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Review:
 A
few years back, auteur Andrew Niccol, somehow got the idea for a
neat concept: what if someone got stuck in the international
lounge of an airport and somehow couldn’t get out? Perfect for a
sitcom, but Niccol doesn’t do television, he and pals Sacha
Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson wrote up a cute screenplay and after
years of having it just sit around while the finance people tried
to figure out what to do with it…
Then came along Tom Hanks, and soon after came Steven
Spielberg, who was yet again frustrated in his bid to do a fourth
"Indiana Jones" flick. So with product placement galore to help
finance the thing, it was at last a go…
Okay, the Eastern European state of Krakozhia is in the middle
of a revolution, and a contractor Viktor Navorski(Tom Hanks)
hasn’t heard about it. He’s on his way to New York to fulfill one
of those silly personal quests that make life worth living. He’ll
find out soon enough.
The rule is this: one completely absurd thing is permitted and
as long as everything around it is logically constructed then
suspension of disbelief is plausable. The absurdity here is not
that Krakozhian passports and the legally obtained visas within
them will not be recognized when the poor, unsuspecting travelers
show up, but that Frank Dixon(Stanley Tucci), the head of customs
at JFK international airport, after promising to get Victor a
translator to help him out of his situation, would just leave him
in the terminal to rot instead of fulfilling his promise within a
day or so.
With an evil bureaucratic villain to play off of, we now go off
into sitcomland.
The first thing our hero has to do after the garbage guy(Kumar
Pallana) dumps his food vouchers in the trash, is to try to earn
money. The ingenuity in doing so begins to warm the hearts of some
of the people who work there and soon he’s got some friends among
the workers, passing notes between A lovesick food handler(Diego
Luna) and a beautiful customs agent(Chi McBride), hanging out with
some others and getting a job in construction at the terminal, we
get comfy in the world of the terminal, just the thing for a
sitcom.
But no sitcom would be complete without a little romance, so in
comes a stuardess named Amelia Warren(Catherine Zeta-Jones), who’s
been having a torrid affair with a married diplomat and doesn’t
know that our hero is for all intents and purposes a prisoner.
The movie goes trippingly along it’s merry way and is actually
quite delightful. It’s Spielberg’s smallest film in years despite
the fact that they had to build a huge set for it. It’s worth the
money for an evening out.
Eric Lurio
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