This new Tom Hanks starrer from director Tom Tykwer is a largely frustrating affair. There is a kernel of a very good story that gets scuppered by it going off on too many tangents.
Hanks plays Alan Clay, a middle-aged weary American businessman. He is in the process of being divorced by his wife, is struggling to find the money to put his daughter through college, and is barely holding onto his sales job. He is sent to Saudi Arabia to pitch a new communications system to the king. But when he arrives, he finds it hard to get an audience with the monarch and also starts to suffer from ill-health.
The first act of the film is very promising. Hanks does a good job of playing a man at the end of his tether. The relationship with his driver Yousef (Alexander Black) is well set up and the frustrations in his work situation are intriguing. However, from that moment, the film slowly goes downhill. There is a potential relationship with a colleague Hanne (a wasted Sidse Babett Knudsen) that fizzles out, a strange hunting sequence with Yousef, and a completely unconvincing romance with his doctor, Zahra (Sarita Choudhury). Amidst all this, the main part of the story, as it was initially set up, is pretty much forgotten and it gets wrapped up in a perfunctory manner at the end of the movie.
Despite the performances and an unexpected cameo from Ben Whishaw, the film turns out to be largely disappointing. If you want to see a man in a crisis in an anonymous hotel you’d be better off seeing the imperfect ‘Anomalisa’. If you want to see Tom Tykwer at the top of his game, I urge you to seek out the underrated ‘Winter Sleepers’. This is merely a time-filler.
Rating: 5.5 out of 10