Movie Review - A Hologram for the King

A Hologram for the King (2016)

Starring Tom Hanks, Alexander Black, Sarita Choudhary, Sidse Babett Knudson, and Ben Whishaw

Directed by Tom Tykwer

***This film is currently streaming via Amazon Prime***

When businessman Alan Clay (Tom Hanks) travels to Saudi Arabia to hawk his company's holographic telecommunication system to the country's king and government, he's leaving very little behind in the States.  Divorced with a college-aged daughter who wants little to do with him, Alan throws everything into this presentation, but Saudi Arabia isn't exactly the most modernized locale as Alan discovers when his team faces a lack of wifi and sandy floors in their tent located in the desert supplied by the Saudi Arabian king.  The pressure to deliver causes Alan to begin to lose it a bit, coming face-to-face with a late mid-life crisis that unfortunately for him occurs in a foreign country quite different from the one he knows.

A Hologram for the King is well-acted by Hanks and the rest of the cast, but after about forty-five minutes, the film's lack of a decent plot does it in.  Some weird dream-like sequences that begin to populate the film as it progresses set up some weird tonal shifts...and that's followed by a third act that feels full of some unnecessary side plots that purportedly try and resolve Alan's emotional crises, but end up seeming oddly out-of-place.  In the end, the amiable Hanks can't save the "kitchen sink"-type plot and direction that fail to set up a consistent mood.

The RyMickey Rating:  C-