These days, with great television shows, Netflix and other streaming options, and a faster transfer from screen to DVD, it really doesn’t pay to make a mediocre film. Tom Twyker, a German film-maker who is known for experimenting with the traditional film form, has somehow managed to make a meandering, often boring, cliché of a film with his adaptation of A Hologram for the King, originally a novel by Dave Eggers from 2012.
Starring the likeable, easy to adore Tom Hanks, who has excelled at playing the everyman, the film follows Alan Clay (Hanks) a once successful middle-aged salesman who finds himself on a business trip to Saudi Arabia, sent on a hapless mission to try and sell a new 3D communications technology to the Saudi government via a face-to-face with the King, a meeting that never seems to materialise.
This is a story of a man who is lost, finding himself in an utterly foreign country. Unfortunately, what could have been an uplifting fable, like 2011’s excellent, hilarious, heart-warming Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, also adapted from a novel, falls totally flat due to the utterly banal predicaments that Alan faces, along with a script, adapted by Twyker, that seems to have been written by an amateur with no idea of drama, dialogue, and dénouement – an astonishing lapse from the man who made the tightly wound, riveting Run Lola Run (1998) and has since toyed, fascinatingly, with sci-fi in semi-successful but nonetheless mind-expanding experiments like Cloud Atlas (2012), and the Netflix series Sense8 (2015).