Here (2024)
ZERO STARS/****
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly
screenplay by Eric Roth & Robert Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire
directed by Robert Zemeckis
by Walter Chaw If it were only vapid, insipid, faux-high-concept middlebrow treacle, then fine, you know, that’s between you and your withered stump of low-aspiring taste. If it were only a terrible concept done terribly, a body-temperature tongue-bath delivered without enthusiasm or interest, well, then, so be it; I have liked too many of Robert Zemeckis’s movies to muster up the energy to go after a genial tapestry of sopping Hallmark platitudes–especially those that make idiots happy. Happy is in short supply, after all. If it were merely mildly pathetic in its desperation to be liked; had it only avoided the deadly sin of also wishing to be relevant, wise, respected. But, alas, Here isn’t just awful by most measurable standards established over 130 years of this medium’s astonishing evolution–it’s didactic and self-satisfied about it. It’s the spiritual offspring of Paul Haggis’s Crash, another The Blind Side packed to the tippy-top with privileged foolishness in which the soft-pedalling of broad melodrama paints over history’s sins for the validation of one miserable, unmotivated white guy’s congenital lack of introspection and imagination. Who could’ve guessed that this film, widely touted as the reunion of Forrest Gump‘s writer, director, and stars, would be a redux of its messages, too? Has it ever occurred to you that you “never know what you’re gonna get” in a box of chocolates only if you refuse to read it?