TOM HANKS CAST AWAY MOVIE

No one remembers the unsatisfying plot, the grade-school attempts at symbolism or the surprisingly ineffective characterizations. Everyone remembers that ridiculous volleyball and a gaunt, shirtless Hanks with his wild beard and sun-bleached hair.

TOM HANKS CAST AWAY MOVIE

The movie itself is a lot worse than you remember as well. It’s not just Hanks, although he’s pretty insufferable. … was how much worse it was than I remembered. What I didn’t expect - where my memory of deriding the film for 20 years had let me down … I expected to have very strong words about how overrated Hanks’ performance was. I’ll come back to that in a moment, but I think it’s important in negative criticism to be transparent when something doesn’t go how you’d expect. That’s how badly I sought to savage it, and I was ready to rock.īut then Cast Away surprised me. But I was also ready to take notes on the specifics. I knew I had beefs with Hanks’ self-congratulatory acting, the relentless product placement and the utter waste of Helen Hunt’s considerable talents as a meaningless prop in yet another Hanks-led “masterpiece” about the triumph of the schlubby white dude. It’s essentially just “What if Tom Hanks was on an island by himself?” I was so excited to revisit, and rip apart, Cast Away that popped a big bowl of popcorn, grabbed a beer and settled in as though it was a new release I’d anticipated all year.

Good luck finding a review without a dopey dad joke about getting voted off the island.)īeyond a $100 million acting-class experiment, there seemed no reason for this film to exist. I remembered it as the quintessential Tom Hanks flick - overwrought, histrionic and the kind of overt Oscar-bait for which the screenwriter, from the first draft, highlights inevitable awards-show clips in the margin notes (Earlier that year, the media gods gave Cast Away an unexpected gift with the premiere of Survivor. When we set out to compile this battle of words over the merits of America’s Beloved Everyman, I knew - without question - that 2000’s Cast Away had to be first on my list.

Tom hanks cast away