Not as bad as some Zemeckis films

Rating: 5/10 (6 April 2007)

I'm currently going through another one of my "watch films that I truly think I'm going to hate" phases. After all, this IS a Robert Zemeckis film. It does violate one of my rules because I truly like Tom Hanks. I've been a fan ever since I first saw him as Kip in "Busom Buddies" back in '79. I think he's terrible whenever he's a serious actor like in "Forrest Gump" or "Philadelphia", so he's much better here with the hope of an Oscar as far off as a pending rescue. Anyway, not as bad as I had thought but way too long. The official running time is 143 minutes and could have easily been trimmed by 20 minutes. The rescue scene proves that when this director wants to just cut to the chase, he's more than capable of doing so. It's probably the best scene in the film as it comes very unexpectedly and is terrifically shot. You only see that Hanks sees the ship and they just cut right from there to him on a (what else) FedEx plane. They could have dragged things out here with a ton of over dramatics but they didn't. The ending was decent. Of course he delivered the unopened package, but I'm glad we didn't find out what was in it. Revealing that was a no win situation. If it was something completely mundane it would have been another unneeded scene. And if was a cell phone, well that would have been too contrived. The one contrived thing people dredge up is the whole FedEx "Product Placement" framework. Zemeckis claims that FedEx didn't pay a nickel for it, and I believe him. If I were FedEx, I wouldn't have put money into any film that had one of my jets going down, but I'd cooperate with it for free. I'm sure that the Hollywood types TRIED to extort $$$ from FedEx, but settled for their help instead. If I were a director, I definitely would rather use a real corporation in a film like this than a made up one. How many times have you seen a movie with a made up corporation and it becomes almost distracting because you just KNOW who it's supposed to be anyway? Well I guess that every movie deserves at least one viewing and I'm not sorry I spent the (including commercials) three hours watching this one. I love movies and you have to expect the bad with the good with the mediocre. The most amazing thing about a major Hollywood movie like this is the amount of people in the credits! Seems so simple a film to me, but my rough count comes in at almost 500 on the crew alone!