Terminally over-sugared

Rating: 1/10 (16 July 2004)

Oh dear. A great premise for a movie, loosely based on the true story of the immigrant who was stranded at Paris airport due to diplomatic bureaucracy, however Spielberg reduces the whole story to implausible sugary mush.
No doubt the director, famed for his heavy-handed and childlike emotional manipulation, thought he was improving the drama by adding a love interest in the shape of Catherine Zeta-Jones, but no one in their right mind could believe that such an attractive and well-groomed woman would ever fall for the shabby, caricature Russian immigrant as played by Tom Hanks. Such a waste of talent and money.
Spielberg obviously believes that his audience has a mental age of 10, and an exceptionally low IQ, as that is probably the only target group that would enjoy this very silly and soppy romantic drama. Shame on you, Steven Spielberg, for offering adult cinema-goers this sugary pap!
Hanks' performance is no worse and no better than his recent stint in The Ladykillers, i.e. mildly amusing in a cartoonish sort of way. If I were Russian I would be seriously insulted by the bordering-on racist portrayal. Miraculously, Hank's character moved from speaking almost no English to being extremely fluent within a very short period, and gaining a posse of bumbling friends within the airport. The genre should have been listed as fantasy rather than romantic drama. And as for the comedy aspect - I seem to have totally missed it, unless it's deemed funny to laugh at foreigners in a difficult predicament.
With some character development and a decent script, this could have been an interesting film, however it's two leads were sadly wasted in this saccharine turkey.