After the relative darkness of Minority Report and the light-hearted charm of Catch Me If You Can, Steven Spielberg jacks up the sentimentality stakes with The Terminal. Tom Hanks is in uber Forrest Gump mode as Viktor Navorski, an Eastern European who ends up being trapped in JFK Airport. The reason? His homeland of Krakozhia undergoes a military coup and his status cannot be recognised one way or the other until the outcome of the war becomes clear. Caught in a bureaucratic limbo, Navorski has to stay in the airport until others, like the ambitious head of airport operations, Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) can sort matters out.
Unashamedly saccharine, The Terminal comes off the product of an unholy union between Forrest Gump and Big. Though it is loosely based on a true story, there's never much of an effort made by the director or his screenwriter to impose much plausibility on the proceedings. Hanks wheels around the film in good spirits, but the unwillingness of the script to scratch the surface of the quandary that he finds himself in merely undermines his efforts. The inevitable love interest in the shape of Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn't really help matters and highlights how slight things are in the narrative, all 129 minutes of it.
