Movie Review: 'A Hologram for the King'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Alan Clay needs to find a new direction and start over.
That's the fuzzy premise of the meandering, Kafkaesque comedy-drama, A Hologram for the King, anchored by the estimable Tom Hanks.
The two-time Oscar winner (Best Actor for Philadelphia in 1993 and Forrest Gump in 1994) stars as Alan Clay, a divorced, middle-aged, failed American salesman/business consultant who leaves recession-engulfed America and travels all the way to Saudi Arabia, where he can chase the outsourced American Dream by joining the international competition and pitch a new IT system – a three-dimensional holographic system -- to the wealthy titular monarch.
It's intended for a massive complex being built in the desert.
He needs the gig so that he can forestall foreclosure, avoid bankruptcy, pay his daughter's college tuition, salvage his career, and resuscitate his sputtering self-esteem.
And he's got a strange metaphoric growth on his back, which a fetching local physician played by Sarita Choudhury agrees to treat.
This fish-out-of-water story is more accurately a fish-in-the-desert story, although water does come into play late in the game.
But by then, the film – which sometimes seems to move as if underwater, which also eventually turns literal -- seems to have turned into a shaggy dog story: like some of the characters, we've found ourselves spending much of our time waiting and waiting and wondering when something was going to happen.
German director Tom Tykver (Cloud Atlas, Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior, Heaven, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The International), who also adapted the best-selling Dave Eggers novel, certainly balances his movie on Hanks' shoulders, which would normally be a productive approach.
But in this case, the star is straight-jacketed by the role and the infuriatingly scattered script, which contains far too much of what can only politely be described as narrative filler.
It shares those Hanks-but-no-Hanks traits and more with director Barry Levinson's Rock the Kasbah, a comedy Bill Murray starred in last year, that also featured a struggling guy who turns to the Middle East for a new business beginning.
By the time A Hologram for the King approaches its climax, it seems to have wandered in the desert too long and been deluded into believing that the oasis of an ending that it offers is actually an appropriate conclusion to the proceeding thus far.
It is very definitely not: the parts just do not match.
The out-of-the-blue denouement even calls into question the focus and intentions of the screenplay we've been attending to up to that point.
So we'll propose an IT system of 1-1/2 stars out of 4. What, ultimately, is A Hologram for the King about? Only honest answer? It's about an hour-and-a-half.
