The Terminal

The Terminal – It’ll Kill Ya…With Laughter…
by Michael Flanagan

Solid

But it’s a bit too long.  By a bit, I mean only fifteen minutes or so.  But that 15 minutes is everything.  By the time you reach the conclusion, during which you find the answer to the heart of the entire film, you will be startled at how little you care.

See, Spielberg figured, if Peter Jackson can have five endings, so can he.  Except The Terminal isn’t a more-than-12-hour epic blockbuster based on timeless books.  The Terminal is a great romantic comedy.  The humorous moments in this thing made me laugh longer and harder than I have in a long time.  However, comedies, great comedies, should be short.  An hour and a half.  Okay, it’s Spielberg and Hanks.  An hour forty five, fifty maybe.  Maybe.  128 minutes is too  much.

What, then, would I cut?  Who the hell cares, Spielberg made this, he knows what he’s doing.  But, if I were locked in the editing room, I’d probably, when it all came down to it, if I had to choose, if I were held responsible for getting this sucker to an easy hour point five, I’d cut Catherine Zeta Jones.  So it wouldn’t be a romantic comedy, who cares?  Then it would be a really good comedy in its own right.

The ending, you say?  The surprising twist?  The result that none of us expected?  (If you’re still reading and don’t want to know, you need more schooling.)  If the storyline is pointless in terms of the story, and don’t tell me she was the only conceivable plot device to getting Hanks out of the airport, if the romantic part holds no purpose, then the twist ending, as unusual as it may be in this day and age of happy endings, also holds no meaning.  Cut out that entire story, and you have a superb comedy.  With it in there, you have an almost-superb comedy that runs out of steam when it should be pulling into the station.
 

Tom Hanks..."Working."  ...  Divas, Yeesh.

That being said, Tom Hanks is amazing.  He’s damn funny, with great comic timing, and falls like no one else.  And in the scene where he’s trying to piece together what happened in his country, running from television to television, he exhibits so much of the character’s heart that we would forget he was Tom Hanks, if not for the fact that he is so damn good.

The supporting cast is also very strong—the knife guy from Royal Tenenbaums, the masturbator from Y Tu Mama Tambien, and the Chief from Undercover Brother are great players.  Stanley Tucci plays a great antagonist.  Actually, there isn’t a weak performance in the film.  Jones’ is fine, but, as I said before, unnecessary.  In this film, I mean.

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