Tediously slow and overall pointless

Rating: 4/10 (17 April 2004)

I had heard a lot about this film before I actually saw it, and the idea of a man unwittingly being present at the biggest moments of four decades seemed funny and entertaining enough. But I was heavily disappointed.
What Forrest Gump lacks most is a stringent storytelling. The movie just doesn´t get off the ground. It isn´t the fault of the actors in general and certainly not of Tom Hanks, who gives a brilliant storyteller and doesn´t make pure slapstick out of the dimwitted Forrest - the actors are doing fine jobs. It´s the fault of the filmmakers. Lots of shots and even whole motives are plainly useless, not even in adding atmosphere, a lot of plot turns vanish into nothingness. The touching moments are soaked in corny music and lose their emotional potential, the technically great TV montages get less entertaining every time because they are wasted in bad punchlines. The whole dialogue is highly predictable. The reenactment of the Hippie movement is quite sound, and details like the Watergate joke are good laughs, but the scenes in between are painfully slow, at the end even simply boring. About a thousand times you are led to believe that there is a deeper moral than "enjoy your life with the things you can do really good" (this being introduced at the very beginning), but it isn´t.
I don´t know what, except for the few gags that really function, could earn this movie the triumph that it had and still has. Watch "Hair" for the Sixties and "Harold and Maude" for the moral, you will be better off.