Mr Deedski Goes To New York

Rating: 3/10 (7 May 2005)

Mean-spirited indeed(ski) would be he who criticises a movie for its timing. But then again, I am. So here goes: Spielberg did everything and more in Terminal's 2-hour plus running time in 'Amazing Stories', the 80s / 90s feel-good TV shows that managed the same yearnings for innocence and the American Dream -- but in 40 minutes or less.
A lot earlier than that, and almost certainly before the majority of reviewers here were even born, Frank Capra did the same. But with a stronger script. And a better cast. And -- and this is the clincher -- a far greater sense of timing.
For 'Terminal' is at least 60 years too late. The feel-good to which it aspires, the whimsy which it (laudably) seeks to celebrate, has long gone from any scenario involving the uncomprehending stateless trapped in the aspic of a hostile world.
Truth is, it's difficult to think when such a scenario was remotely heart-warming anyway. Unless I missed some great hit-of-the-season show like 'Ellis Island: The Laugh-In'.
With sets, art direction and special effects to emigrate, if not die, for, 'Terminal' certainly has a heightened sense of reality. But other than that, it's stupefyingly empty, a vast and expensive transit lounge of half-formed ideas ground under the footsteps of a script that moves so clinically from A to B that it seems no more than a mechanistic reprise of elementary screen-writing -- you know the primer I mean, where 10 pages in this happens and 20 pages in this happens, and the hook gets baited not a moment later than halfway down page 38. . .
With 'Close Encounters' and 'ET', Spielberg showed true genius as a film maker capable of chronicling humanity's endearing panoply of hopes, dreams, fallibilities and fears.
With 'Terminal', he has Tom Hanks doing a Chaplinesque shuffle.
There's no humanity here. No relevance (as Capra had). And seemingly no understanding of the real obscenity of small lives shattered by big bureaucracies. Everyman does not live in this particular terminal, only a cast of characters unearthed from Capra's back-stock, all of them increasingly over-drawn and thus increasingly over-wrought.
Calling this 'a masterpiece' is like calling a painting-by-numbers canvas a genuine artwork.
Come on, Spielberg. The creative genius you have as one of the finest film-makers of this or any other generation cries out for something far, far better than this. Do us all a favour and find it quickly, before people start to wonder if your talent has left the departure gate once and for all. . .