What a convoluted, nonsensical, silly mess

Rating: 4/10 (28 March 2005)

This movie was just awful. The plot to the movie seems interesting at first glance, but it's obvious that the writers had trouble when it came to making the movie into anything good beyond that. Tom Hanks is traveling to NY from his Eastern European homeland when a revolution breaks out and his country is no longer recognized by the U.S. He is therefore stuck in the airport, not allowed to enter the New York, and not allowed to fly out since they are forced to confiscate his passport.
The movie then fills up the next 2+ hours with ridiculous characters and the antagonist is painted to be unnecessarily evil while hanks is continuously painted as a saint. Then a number of other characters are introduced just to fill up the time. If you think too hard about anything that goes on, this movie is just ridiculous: marriage proposals by people that have never met, Hanks is hated and dogged by the 'bad guy' for absolutely no reason, Zeta-Jones asks Hanks out on a date 30 seconds after breaking up with her 'affair' of 7 years, the food supplier seems to work 24 hours a day and is able to leave just about anytime he wants to talk to Hanks, an Indian janitor runs out to a plane to stop it with a mop because Hanks is such a savior,nobody can seem to understand that Hanks can't speak English and instead of getting a translator they just continue to waste their time talking to him... it goes on and on. This movie just wouldn't end and the loosely glued together coincidences just get worse and worse.
This really has to be one of the worst disappointments I have ever seen. The ending just dragged, the relationship between Hanks and Zeta-Jones is completely vacuous and in the end just seems to act as another tool to show how saintly Hanks' character is. I hate movies that create unrealistic protagonists and antagonists, and this is one of those movies.
All in all, this movie is just a mess! What a waste of time.