about as much fun as being stuck at the airport

Rating: 4/10 (1 October 2005)

Viktor Navorski is a man without a country - literally. On the very day his plane touches down at JFK, Viktor learns that a coup has occurred back in his fictional home country of Krakozha. Among other inconveniences, this international crisis renders his passport invalid until the United States government agrees to recognize and establish diplomatic relations with the destabilized country's new leadership. Until then, Viktor remains a virtual prisoner in the terminal, unable to leave the premises and forced to live under the watchful eye of airport security. There's a certain irony in the fact that Viktor, who was presumably raised in a draconian communist country, becomes the ultimate victim of a de-humanized bureaucracy and a mountain of red tape the minute he sets foot on American soil. From that moment on, he has to find a way to survive in this strange new environment, but eventually he learns to make the airport his home, winning friends and wooing a love interest (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones) into the bargain.
Certainly, there are those who will find this fable about a simple man, trapped somewhere between the worlds of Capra and Kafka, heartwarming and charming. All I can say is that I found it, for the most part, aggravatingly contrived and cutesy, too infatuated with its own premise to develop a sustainable storyline. The problem begins with Tom Hanks who has milked the Average Joe/ Mr. Nice Guy shtick so much throughout his long career that it has long since lost any impact it once might have had. Adding a cutesy Eastern European accent to the brew just makes the performance all that more insufferable. In essence, Victor is reduced to little more than a "man/child," hardly a character worth developing a full length, tour de force feature film around.
Steven Spielberg, who normally can do no wrong as a director, for some reason is unable to make an effective go of things here. Could it be because Spielberg handles sentiment well when he's working in a generally unsentimental genre like science fiction where he has some built-in tension to work off of, but that when he's dabbling in a highly sentimental genre like romantic comedy, he runs out of energy and vision? He's done a terrific job recreating an entire functioning airport terminal on a soundstage, but none of that really matters very much when we begin feeling as trapped inside the setting as Viktor himself does. Throughout the whole movie, I just kept wishing Viktor would bust his way through the terminal doors and find his way into a more interesting story. Almost all the secondary characters are shallow, stereotypical and uninteresting, while Stanley Tucci's nasty little airport manager is not only annoying and repulsive but completely incomprehensible from a psychological point of view.
"The Terminal" is one of those movies that is so impressed with its own sweetness and goodness that it winds up patronizing all the "little people" it thinks it's celebrating. This is a film strictly for those who actually enjoy being stuck at the airport.