Starring: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chi McBride

4 out of 10 stars

Afflicted with a chronic, and ultimately fatal, attack of the cutes, Steven Spielberg's The Terminal is his slightest film to date.

Though undoubtedly imbued with the master craftsman touch, he and Tom Hanks have made a Roberto Benigni movie without Roberto Benigni. The "funny foreigner makes me laugh" shtick is what comes across here instead of the "fish-out-of-water and starting to evolve" story they attempted to make. Hanks plays the funny foreigner, Victor Navorski, who finds himself without a country, and trapped inside the confines of John F. Kennedy International Airport, when his Eastern European homeland of Krakoshia experiences a military coup. Since the US doesn't recognize the current regime it can't recognize Victor's status, thus he can't leave the airport or he'll risk being deported.

Particularly damaging, right off to the film, is Spielberg's inability to make any of this plausible to us. First off--and it's minor but it adds up--we see the airport's Homeland Security officer, Frank Dixon (the ever-great Stanley Tucci), fingering a group of Chinese tourists as smugglers. The tourists do indeed seem to be hiding something for they take off like madmen, dashing through the airport. Navorski is sitting on a bench when he's approached by Dixon's right-hand guard, Ray Thurman (Barry Shabaka Henley) and asked to come with him. In the background a few of the Chinese tourists are still seen bolting along in the background. Thurman does nothing. Right there he is no longer a security officer, he's just an actor playing one and no more serious about this than we should be.

That throw-away joke is just one of a series (look for a juggling waiter later) that Spielberg allows, probably instigated, and his inability to walk away from that easy mark irreparably harms the whole of the film. There was a time when Spielberg built our confidence and stashed our credibility until the end, when he'd cash in on it in spectacular, and satisfactory fashion. But in his recent films, Catch Me If You Can (Hanks's Carl Hanratty pulls out the lone red sock that turned his wash load pink) and Minority Report (the jet pack cooks the hamburgers on the grill), he keeps returning to us like a teenager at an ATM machine.

What follows is just as damaging. It's a long talking head sequence where Dixon explains to Victor why his passport has been confiscated, and why he can't leave the international confines of the airport, even though it's well established halfway through the conversation that Navorski can't understand English. Thurman gets in the act too, throwing in further points of clarification. Spielberg wants to make the point that the bureaucratic system has them so ingrained with procedure that they continue on in the exposition even though they're relatively aware that Navorski doesn't understand a word they're saying. He does, however, seem to get the notion that he can't leave the airport, though I'm hard pressed to say how.

Where the film does shine are the sequences that probably attracted these two in the first place, a kind of Cast Away survival story within the confines of a very civilized environment. Viktor learns that returning carts will earn him quarters and soon becomes the airport's unofficial cart shepherd. He gets a construction job after building a beautiful cornice. He helps a fellow airport employee, Enrique Cruz (Diego Luna), woo a customs official (Zoë Saldana). He earns the respect of the airport staff by defusing a potentially dangerous situation with an upset immigrant. It's very winning and told straight.

The rest of it, however, is not so straight, and, frankly, provides the kind of sentimentality that hasn't been this obvious (with the same level of talent involved) since Patch Adams. Navorski falls for a gorgeous and incredibly unstable airline stewardess, played by the getting-prettier-by-the-minute Catherine Zeta-Jones, which causes slipping and silliness. A sub-plot with a mysterious can of Planters peanuts and Navorski's real reason for coming to America have no heft after all the shenanigans and rim-shots.

But the real prat-fall here is Spielberg's. I don't care if we have to get through this middling fare as long as he's working, keeping fit, trying new things. He'll get back up again. And something he learned making The Terminal will make the cinema the richer, even if it isn't the film itself.