weak

Rating: 4/10 (6 January 2002)

For a start you've got a premiss for a movie that pretty much gives the whole story away before you've even sat down to watch - you know this guy is going to get trapped on a desert island and you know he'll escape (this being Hollywood). So where's the surprise? Where's the hook?
Secondly, you realize this is a weak idea for a movie, pretty soon after Tom Hanks washes up onto the island. See, the beauty of a novel like 'Robinson Crusoe' is that it has the ability to express one man's loneliness on an island through the power of provoking images in your mind as you read. Of course film can't do that, at least not mainstream Hollywood film, so it's left to the director to patronize the audience because he believes we couldn't possibly cope with watching one man never talking, so he makes him talk to a soccer ball. Unbelievably, the director convinces us this is rational by displaying this as some kind of coping with loneliness and the onset of madness.
Another sign of its weakness is the incredibly bad fact that about three quarters of the way through there's a fade-out and the hugely weak concept of a "FOUR YEARS LATER" caption appears on screen, and suddenly we're transported to a long curly-haired bearded Hanks who somehow has survived all this time with no account of how.
Worst of all, this movie is disgusting in terms of the intense amount of product placement for FedEx, where their logo is shown in pretty much every shot. Is it a movie or merely a commercial? It doesn't even attempt to do this in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Also, the moment where Tom Hanks struts around banging his chest and shouting "I have made fire!" is possibly one of the most unintentionally horribly comic things I've ever seen.
'Cast Away' does score a few points in the fact that it's well shot, the plane crash is great, and it kept me watching, but it's a little too long, and frankly a pretty weak idea with a horrendous amount of product placement.