The Terminal (12A)

Once he might have been the new James Stewart. But now, in his effort to become the most popular actor in American movies, Tom Hanks is in danger of turning into the new Bing Crosby. He has always been a terrifically personable performer, and his child-inside-the-man act in Big is still a benchmark for body-swap impersonation. But ever since his best-actor Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, 10 years ago, his need to play the American Everyman has pinned him into a straitjacket of decency and dullness. He tried to be edgy in Road To Perdition but looked merely glum, and he brightened the Coens' lousy remake of The Ladykillers, but it was a vaudeville turn rather than a character study.

Once he might have been the new James Stewart. But now, in his effort to become the most popular actor in American movies, Tom Hanks is in danger of turning into the new Bing Crosby. He has always been a terrifically personable performer, and his child-inside-the-man act in Big is still a benchmark for body-swap impersonation. But ever since his best-actor Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, 10 years ago, his need to play the American Everyman has pinned him into a straitjacket of decency and dullness. He tried to be edgy in Road To Perdition but looked merely glum, and he brightened the Coens' lousy remake of The Ladykillers, but it was a vaudeville turn rather than a character study.

In Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, Hanks plays another of his childlike innocents, only this time he's not mentally retarded or emotionally regressive, but Eastern European - Gumpski. He plays Viktor Navorski, a citizen of "Krakozhia", whose arrival at JFK airport coincides with a violent coup in his homeland. His passport invalidated, Viktor is not allowed to enter the United States, and must improvise a home for himself in the terminal's international transit lounge while he waits for news from Europe.

A comedy of resourcefulness gets under way as he learns some basic English, forages for food, and befriends certain airport employees, including a pretty flight attendant, Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who has a penchant for unavailable men. As the days pass into weeks, and the weeks into months, Viktor becomes thoroughly at ease in this in-between world, and even contrives to land himself a job doing construction work inside the terminal.

This feels very much like Spielberg riding to the defence of America, once a welcoming host, but now in a state of alarm about its borders being breached. So Viktor might not be permitted to set foot on US soil, but hell, look at the way the country still manages to reward initiative and "can-do". Realising that their man needs some kind of antagonist, the film creates an uptight customs bureaucrat, Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), who's irked by Viktor's irrepressible spirit and wants the airport rid of him - wants him to be "someone else's problem".

But Dixon's only fault is that he's not, like everyone else in the movie, a "people person", and Tucci can't make this by-the-book stickler the least bit threatening. He is James Finlayson to Hanks's Stan Laurel, his schemes to expel the intruder constantly thwarted, and when his boss tells him, "You could learn something from Navorski", you can sense Dixon holding back an exasperated, "Doh!"

What really interests Spielberg is the scale of the place he's working in. There was no possibility of filming in an actual airport because of security constraints, so the film-makers did the next best thing and had a full-sized airport terminal built, complete with retail outlets such as Borders, Swatch and Hugo Boss: the American mall as microcosm. The camera roves eagerly through these huge public spaces, and, instead of focusing on their oppressive, late-night emptiness - as, say, Edward Hopper might have done - Spielberg seems to regard them as comfortingly familiar: the bland of the free. Far from being a place Viktor must escape, the terminal is presented as a kind of frontier town where friendships can be made and a living earned.

One feels something almost wilful in Spielberg's optimism. Did it not occur to him that Viktor's predicament, alone and penniless in a foreign country, might actually be a dreadful misfortune? At some point it must have done, because (though it is nowhere acknowledged in the credits) the scriptwriters Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson are partly working from the true story of an Iranian refugee, Merhan Nasseri, who, robbed of his passport and travel documents, has lived at Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, for the last 16 years. Spielberg's DreamWorks company paid him $300,000 for his story, though reports of Nasseri's mental state suggest he has little chance of enjoying it.

Knowing this, one can't help finding The Terminal a dull, meretricious and faintly appalling picture. A bleak comedy might reside in the plight of this hapless prisoner, like Bill Murray trapped in Groundhog Day. Spielberg, however, falls back on the lazy slapstick of people slipping on polished floors, or else tortures us with heart-warming whimsy, maddeningly signalled in John Williams's score by pizzicato violins and chirpy woodwind.

I found myself watching mostly through latticed fingers, whether it was the creepily sexless flirtation between Viktor and Amelia, or the out-of-nowhere romance Viktor engineers between two airport employees, who are eventually waved off to connubial bliss aboard a baggage trolley. We're also meant to cheer when Viktor outwits the unpleasant Dixon and strikes a blow for common decency; no longer is he the resident oddball, but a champion of "the little people", a modern Capra-esque hero who takes on the system and beats it. But the system is never properly against him. It's just that one bureaucrat has made the mistake of calling him "unacceptable".

The message seems to be that we can "learn something" from Viktor Navorski, though what that is, I'm not sure: Don't make a fuss next time your plane is delayed? Don't make a pass at cute flight attendants even if they give you the eye? Here's my own message: avoid The Terminal like you would Heathrow on a Bank Holiday weekend.