#Tom hanks cast away movie

How Dave Eggers’s smart novel about technology got turned into this total mess of a movie remains a little baffling two years after its release. He’s clearly dialed up a little too high in order to carry a thin, empty premise, but still, check out the supporting cast: Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Jim Belushi, Edward Herrmann, and a finally-done-playing-Leia (for another 30 years, anyway) Carrie Fisher. Even in his first movie, Hanks was charming everybody.Īn instantly forgettable “comedy thriller” in which Hanks plays a doofus concert pianist thrust clumsily into a murder mystery. His dialogue clearly sets him up to be murdered, but the filmmakers liked him so much that they decided to let his character live. It’s cheapo schlock, but it’ll live forever because of Hanks’s appearance as a student who’s skeptical that the protagonist is really being stalked. Hanks’s movie debut was a slasher film that’s an obvious Halloween knockoff, right down to the mask and music. It goes without saying that there’s never a bad time to watch a Toy Story movie. A note: We limited our guide to live-action movies only, meaning Hanks’s superb turns in the four Toy Story films aren’t on the list. Thus, we present you with our complete ranking of Tom Hanks’s 50 movie roles, up to and including this weekend’s Elvis. The guy might only play a certain number of notes, but he always manages to make them sound unique. Hanks has transformed himself from the party dude of Bachelor Party to the romantic lead of Sleepless in Seattle to the war hero of Saving Private Ryan to the six different characters he plays, amusingly, in Cloud Atlas.

But it’s not fair to paint Hanks as playing the same character over and over, and it certainly wouldn’t be fair to say that he doesn’t challenge himself or take chances. There’s some truth to this, of course - Hanks wouldn’t work as Travis Bickle, no matter how hard he tried. As a result, he’s often accused of playing one character: the fundamentally decent, good-hearted, noble but humble all-American Everyman.

You might say there’s a unified theory of Hanks: The actor contains multitudes, but is always Tom Hanks. This article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to include Tom Hanks’s recent work. Photo: Vulture and Courtesy of the Studios

Tom hanks cast away