‘Finch’ Review: A Predictable Re-Tread of ‘Cast Away’
While Finch contains a terrific performance from Tom Hanks and crisp cinematography, the movie’s use of survival film tropes makes it a tiring watch.
Tom Hanks has already proven himself to be a capable dramatic actor givving arguably his best role yet in Robert Zemeckis’ ‘Cast Away’, in which a FedEx executive crash lands and is stranded on a deserted island and must find his way home with an anthropomorphized volleyball as his best friend. In ‘Finch’, Hanks is stranded again, this time in a dystopia where radiation has killed most of life on earth, with a dog as his best friend. Hanks plays Finch Weinberg, one of the last humans on Earth slowly dying of radiation poisoning. However, before he dies, Finch builds an android in the hopes that it’ll keep his dog company once he passes. The android’s name is Jeff (Caleb Landry Jones) and together, they go on a road trip to San Francisco to find the Golden Gate Bridge before a 40-day nuclear storm arrives to Finch’s bunker.
So, you’ve got a road trip movie, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film and a survival drama. Director Miguel Sapochnik sure likes to blend different cinematic genres, and yet none of it is any good. Its script, from Craig Luck and Ivor Powell, is so painstakingly predictable and uninspired that you can see everything coming from a mile away. But what’s even worse is how inconsistent it is with its own continuity. For example, since Finch is dying, he needs to cough up blood throughout whenever the script wants it, to remind the audience how frail he is. In a scene that follows up a rather painful one where Finch throws up a big amount of blood, here he is running like a marathon athlete as if the screenwriters have blissfully forgotten that your main character is dying.
What’s even more egregious here is how Sapochnik uses the framing device of coughing up blood to emotionally manipulate the audience to care about Finch and/or Jeff. It always happens at a moment where tension runs high between the two, and where the audience needs to be reminded of the frailty of humans (and animals) in this post-apocalyptic world to make sure the audience grows closer to Finch and Jeff. But it just comes across as cheap drama, never letting the relationship between the two entities flow and become genuine. Sapochnik exclusively seems to be interested in rapidly moving alone to the last scene where Finch will predictably die instead of forging a bond between man and robot. In Cast Away, you felt for Wilson, even if it was a volleyball since a bond was forged between the two as the years went by.
There is no bond in Finch, in part because the main character finds Jeff irritating. Irritating? Well, that’s an understatement. Landry Jones is a highly talented actor, but he is pitifully miscast here with a horribly unfunny vocal performance that seems to take inspiration from ‘Borat’ meets ‘Chappie’? Most critics who have reviewed Finch so far have talked about Jeff sounding like Borat, and they’re all right. Some have said that this distinct voice has made the character lovable but how can you possibly make a Borat-sounding robot lovable, when you’re only waiting for Jeff to say wowaweewa as he drives Finch’s RV for the first time? It’s incredibly distracting and removes any emotional levity that Sapochnik wants to permeate in Jeff’s personality.
Thankfully, Tom Hanks is great as always and elevates the script’s fairly formulaic material to watchable quality. But he’s the only one that truly cares about this movie. The CGI in most of its big action set-pieces feels unfinished and plucked straight out of an Asylum production, with most of its budget focused on rendering Jeff to life. That sounds fine and all, but if the action sequences had better CGI, it might have been a more solid production, since Jo Willems’ cinematography is truly magnificent. He’s always been one to look out for, particularly on his collaborations with Francis Lawrence, but Willems might have pulled off his best work yet in Finch. In fact, Hanks and Willems’ cinematography was the only reason that kept me going to watch this film until the end, as Willems crafts some truly indelible shots that will, unfortunately, be overlooked once Awards Season comes into play next month. The way he lingers his camera at Finch, as he tells Jeff a flashback story is something to behold, and the flashback itself contains some of the best use of shallow focus I’ve seen all year.
It’s just a damn waste when Finch seemingly never wants to soar past an incredibly predictable script featuring sci-fi and survival-drama tropes we’ve all seen before. Even if Tom Hanks gives a great performance as always, he can’t save Finch from being another run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic sci-fi survival film.