(On the plus side, Get Out‘s Caleb Landry-Jones voices the robot, and it’s the most human and least creepy thing the wide-eyed young actor has ever done.) There are CGI catastrophes and one stunning overhead shot of a metropolis in ruins that remind you that director Miguel Sapochnik has a half dozen Game of Thrones episodes to his name. Even a tragi-expositionary monologue flatlines. It’s less like he’s on autopilot, and more like he’s tamped down so hard on his charisma for this character that the basic good, bad, and ugly of Finch barely register. Hanks may be in prime 3,000-yard-stare mode, which he’s more than perfected after decades of playing decent men facing down disasters, but there’s no sense of the spark he usually brings to roles like this. Although you might wonder during some of the more ham-fisted and cloyingly sentimental moments whether you are being pranked. It is also the clunkiest parenting parable to come down the pike in a long time and, we can assure you, a real movie, as opposed to something we just made up courtesy of a Mad Libs exercise. (Feel free to tick “biblical reference” off your checklist.) So the three of them pile into a customized Winnebago, point the vehicle west toward San Francisco, and pray that Jeff can learn to be human before his actual human companion shuffles off this mortal coil.įinch is, by design, a road movie, a robot’s coming-of-age tale, an ecological cautionary tale, a sci-fi weepie, Cast Away: The End-Times Edition, and a two-hander drama, with one of said hands being metal. First, however, man, dog and droid have to get out of their dystopian Dodge ASAP, as a storm predicted to last 40 days will essentially leave them imprisoned. This tall, loping toddler of a robot - having rejected William Shakespeare and Napoleon Bonaparte as potential names, he’s eventually dubbed “Jeff ” we would have gone with Mecha-Wilson, personally, but whatever - has to be taught how to walk, to properly talk, to understand the responsibility of nurturing a living thing. Thanks to his dogged collecting of scrap and scanning of books onto a hard drive, he’s about to create a caretaker. But then who will take care of his best friend, a scrappy terrier named Goodyear?! This humble hero has made peace with the fact he will soon meet his maker. And even though Finch has been careful to avoid exposure to deadly UVA rays and 165-degree temperatures outside of his underground lab/home base, he can feel the radiation poisoning working its way through his system. Ten years ago, a solar flare turned the ozone layer “into Swiss cheese ” after an electromagnetic pulse knocked out power grids across the country and extreme weather began ripping through towns and cities, the thin fabric that held civilization together was torn asunder. It’s all going to be fine.Įxcept it’s not, because this former robotics engineer is slowly dying. But we’re riding shotgun with the Last Everyman on Earth. Because it’s Hanks, however, there’s something oddly reassuring about this gent scavenging for food and navigating monster dust storms. He is also singing Don McLean’s “American Pie” while a miniature makeshift droid - imagine WALL-E fucked a shopping cart - trails him down the aisles of an abandoned superstore. 5 on Apple TV+), he’s marching through the desolate, toxic wasteland of downtown St. When we meet Finch Weinberg, the title character in this worst-case-scenario handwringer (premiering Nov. Yet not even Tom Hanks, national treasure and officially the nicest man in Hollywood USA, can stop the apocalypse. He has rescued mermaids, survived being marooned in deep space and on desert islands, matched wits with albino monks and Somali pirates, solved crimes with canines, and won World War II several times over.
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