How sad is this?

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Absolutely Fantastic

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Pacing, structure and subject matter were off with this film. It was enjoyable enough really, however, its implementation was faulty and the directing, messy.Watching this movie, it started to feel a lot like a Sci-Fi Psychological Mystery Thriller, given the combination of the way in which the King was always being absent, the flashbacks, breaking chairs, "reasons" for constantly waking up late, the bump on his back and the overall tone of this film; even worse, how that receptionist was behaving.E.g. There was a scene where the receptionist adamantly and unapologetically said that Karim was in New York. A scene later, we find that Karim is in the very same building. Upon Alan meeting Karim, Karim seemed quite eerie. As they walk back to reception, while Alan is talking about the receptionist, she is now no longer by her desk, with the laptop off, as if, nobody was actually ever there to begin with, then as he passes, Karim doesn't even bother to look at the receptionists desk. A desk by the way, that is literally just a single desk in the middle of the foyer. And don't even get me started on the condos construction site.A Hologram For the King is funny at points, not too many though, however, there isn't much to follow in this film. What you thought it was, turns out it's not, and what it is, happens a bit late, and thus adds to what is an abrupt ending to this movie. His relationship with Yousef, the presentation, the deal and his communication with his daughter, end about the same as that wife, car and home in the beginning of the movie. 5/10.

One of those European films that chooses an American star to look more acceptable for American audiences, German Director Tom Tykwer's "A Hologram for the King" still looks irredeemably continental, with all the pluses and minuses that that entails.Basically, that means visually interesting, thought-provoking, weird, and not always seeming to make perfect sense!Primarily, Hanks plays (pretty straight, if with moments of comedy) a US businessman working at high level in sales, whose life has been uneven and seems to have gone into a bit of a downward spiral as middle age takes hold. Tellingly, and perhaps as a highlight of this film, Hanks's face glues on a broader and broader smile as he meets his more-youthful team each day, notwithstanding the weird and trying circumstances all are facing as they set up - VERY slowly - to make a high-tech sales pitch in Saud Arabia.Also importantly, our man Alan Clay is both a purveyor and a victim of globalisation, and this topic looms large a couple of times in the film (including at its - again telling - end). Globalisation has put a barrier between Alan and his traditionalist father and is of course what explains Alan's globetrotting in the first place. He is present in countries with Western-looking hotels and advertising hoardings on the surface, but with actually an entirely different culture just (a few millimetres) below that surface.Where "weird" is concerned, well that word is liable to arise from time to time in the watcher of this film (most especially on the scene of a party for diplomats who apparently respond to the strain of their somewhat repressive posting by abandoning absolutely all inhibitions!) But of course the weirdness does not stand in the way of what can at times be absolutely beautiful filming, featuring many scenes of simply gorgeous places where the desert meets the sea.Except that it is not THAT desert and not THAT sea, for this piece is filmed in Morocco (and Egypt), but only a little in Saudi; and that's a deflating discovery, as a key pleasure for the filmgoer is to cogitate on what Saudi Arabia is like. The best we can do here is imagine ... on the basis of concocted Arabia-like locations, and that's a great pity.Presumably, the distance from the true locations offered the artistic distance necessary to achieve the somewhat negative and critical portrayal that we get here, of Saudis as haughty, enigmatic, unpredictable, unreliable (at least from a Western point of view), restricters of rights, users of the death penalty and so on ... as well as of course super-rich! In turn, their kingdom is portrayed here - perhaps authentically - as an edgy place in which various people fear various things, but also endlessly try to "get round" impositions. There's thus considerable hypocrisy on show, to add to the other depicted downsides.Certainly, the first few semi-comedic scenes of the film are intended to show us how completely alienated the Hanks character Alan may be feeling in this new world. But helping him bridge the gap is driver and guide Yousef - a pleasantly dodgy character who offers a sympathetic highlight of the film ... but is in fact played by New York-born Alexander Black!Now that is another somewhat weird circumstance.And yet all this is the strange new world the Hanks character ultimately chooses to live and work in, having fallen in love with a lady doctor who treats his afflictions physical and mental. (And since said doctor is played by London-born Sarita Choudhury, who is half-Indian, we are again being presented with something that is not quite what it is making out to be).Now does the whole possibly hang together as a story? Not really, for how could it?And naturally, some of this is down to Dave Eggers, who wrote the original novel (as he also wrote the in-some-ways-very-innovative "The Circle", whose screen version also features Hanks).However, a certain amount of pleasure (and cross-cultural enlightenment) is to be had as we follow Alan through the aforesaid, pretty unlikely transition, hence I'm risking a 7 for an effort that is fairly unique (though ever-so-slightly recalling the (better?) 2011 film-of-the-book "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen").

11:23 of watching and there is a lot of wrong in this movie. Mostly cultural.

I can't imagine how Tom Hanks accepted to act in this movie! Waste of time, production and money.