Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Alan Clay, a struggling American businessman, travels to Saudi Arabia to sell a new technology to the King, only to be challenged by endless Middle Eastern bureaucracy, a perpetually absent monarch, and a suspicious growth on his back.
Tom Hanks brings his reliable charm to an otherwise meandering adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel. The fish-out-of-water premise in Saudi Arabia offers some cultural novelty and atmospheric cinematography, but the plot drifts without much momentum, and the ending feels unearned and abrupt. Hanks elevates material that would otherwise feel quite thin, and the film captures a melancholic midlife ennui effectively in stretches, but never fully coheres into something satisfying.