Tom Hanks makes the post-apocalypse cuddly in Finch
It's the end of the world as we know it, and you'll feel fine
Film Reviews Finch
Having once held audiences’ attention for well over an hour with nothing but a volleyball for company, Tom Hanks was a natural choice to play the title role in Finch, a post-apocalyptic drama in which he’s the only human actor we ever see (save for three people glimpsed at a distance during a flashback). That’s not to say that his character, Finch Weinberg, is alone. As the film begins—some years after a massive solar flare that destroyed the ozone layer, leading to food shortages that apparently wiped out much of humanity in short order (more from violence than starvation)—he’s surveying what remains of St. Louis, accompanied by his beloved terrier and a small, mobile robot that he calls Dewey. The latter looks and behaves a bit like WALL•E, trundling around collecting useful items; it can also tolerate direct sunlight, whereas Finch has to don full protective gear in order to avoid being roasted by UV radiation.
Finch’s dog, likewise, would surely either starve or fry were Finch not there to constantly protect the mutt. And some ominous coughing fits suggest that he might not be for much longer. Consequently, Finch, who presumably worked in robotics prior to the cataclysm, has something more ambitious than Dewey in the works: a full-sized humanoid companion, gifted with consciousness on par with our own. (Quite a breakthrough for a guy with no colleagues and few resources, but he does at least have a lot of free time. Plus, there’s no real indication of when the film takes place, even if Finch listens to Don McLean and Talking Heads. It could theoretically be half a century in the future.) The robot, which eventually takes the name Jeff, has the inquisitive spirit of a child, and Finch eventually becomes a sort of coming-of-age road movie, with Finch teaching Jeff about life as they head to San Francisco in an RV ahead of an impending “superstorm.”
While Cast Away was mostly a solo show for Hanks, this film is very much a two-hander throughout, albeit with one computer-generated lead. Caleb Landry Jones not only provides Jeff’s voice—which starts out sounding like “fitter happier” machine speech, then gradually evolves to become more human—but he was also physically present on set for the entire shoot, providing a motion-capture template for the robot. This has a strange, likely unintended effect: Jeff frequently exhibits what’s unmistakably the body language of a young person. Seeing a big metal dude sit in the casual, relaxed pose of a college student is just plain weird, and it makes no sense in context; Jeff learns by imitating Finch, who’s over 60 and moves like it. One can perhaps justify this as thematically relevant, since the film involves torch-passing that’s usually generational. Still, it undermines Jeff’s ostensible reality, making the character come across like the digital “skin” that the robot in fact is.
That’s a relatively minor issue, though. Finch’s main problem is its amiable, low-key vibe, which feels at odds with such a grim scenario. At times, the movie plays like a buddy comedy, with Finch as exasperated straight man and Jeff as accident-prone goofball; when Finch tells Jeff that the solar flare turned Earth’s sky into Swiss cheese, the robot takes his words literally and stares upward seeking actual dairy products. And while the dog’s admittedly adorable, Finch’s desire to ensure that it’ll be cared for after he’s gone doesn’t exactly make for high drama. Director Miguel Sapochnik (Repo Men, several key Game Of Thrones episodes, lots of other TV) expertly milks tension from a sequence that sees Finch and company pursued by (unseen) strangers after Jeff naïvely wanders into a trap for scavengers, and Hanks sells the heck out of a sad monologue about how it was that Finch came to have a dog in the first place. For the most part, though, this is a film that, had it given its protagonist a different name, could have been called Glad Max.
80 Comments
Always a big fan of your reviews, Mike, but I can’t say I see where the C+ comes in. Does an amiable, low-key vibe actually make it a worse movie? The way it’s framed in the review scans as personal preference.
a c+ is ‘fine’ and the review makes this sound fine. inessential but watchable is pretty much what i got from it.
A C+ is only “fine” if we take it to mean 75-79/100, which isn’t what the AVC grading system implies. It’s more like a 5/10.
uhh, okay? you may have some hyper-specific math to what the word ‘fine’ means, but the actual content of the review alongside the c+ makes this movie sound ‘fine’ to me.maybe ‘this sounds okay’ is more to your liking? is ‘okay’ higher than ‘fine’?
Ideally, I’d like reviews that talk with enough specificity about the movie that we get a more nuanced takeaway than “this is fine,” but different strokes, I guess.
personally i’d rather the thing being reviewed be better in the first place!
For what it’s worth, Metacritic translates the C+ to 58/100.
The AVC system is to always grade one letter grade lower than the tone of the review would imply. You get used to it.
“THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER MADE!!!”B- review – the AVClub
“Before seeing this movie I was impotent but through the sheer beauty of the projected images in this film, I was cured. That said, it wasn’t the right message for the pandemic age.”’C+ review – the AVClub
The rubric is easy to remember: A: Absolutely see this movie now!
B: Better than most movies.
C: Could miss this movie or you could see it, doesn’t matter.
D: Do NOT see this movie!
F: Fuck, how the hell did this even get released?!
You think that’s discordant, go read Nicole Krauss’ review:“Tom Hanks may be the most gifted actor I’ve ever seen; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a robot and discover the unique essence of his humanity. To watch Finch is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a sentient AI.C+
I’m going to need some additional color on the writer, director and actors’ personal politics as well.
“We heard from an unsubstantiated twitter thread last week that the 2nd unit Assistant Grip had an uncle who used a racial slur in 1973, so C-”- The AV Club.
I’d rather that than the grade inflation you see on other review sites (even the Kinja cousins): “Ninth generic superhero sequel, featuring characters you know doing things you’ve seen before, with decent CGI. A+” I think there should be only about 1-3 movies a year that get an A, and then everything else is scaled down from there.
It would be hard to scale things down from unreleased movies.Films should be judged on their own merits, not by how good it is in comparison with another film.
The whole fundamental essence of a grading scale, or any scale, is relativism and comparison. An “A+” essay in 5th grade would be a “D” essay in college. The only reason “It’s 60 degrees outside” means anything to our brains is through our understanding of how that is hotter/colder than other temperatures we have experienced.There is no such thing as an absolute measurement of anything.
Absolute measurements definitely exist as they are based on purely objective and quantifiable mathematics, you can definitively say that 60 degrees is hotter than 30 degrees because energy can be quantified.There isn’t a quantifiable metric of “movie,” that can be used to compare one film to another, they’re purely subjective. One person’s A for “Citizen Kane,” being a “brilliant piece of filmaking” is another person’s F because it’s “boring as shit, where are the lasers.”Art attempts to accomplish different things— I can’t say “Starry Night” is more art than “The Water Lilies,” it makes no sense. They accomplish different things and are done in completely different styles, I can only judge them based on how they exist or what they elicit, to me, personally.Certainly people can agree that they love a particular film or hold it up as a standard, but film criticism is inherently flawed due to the basic nature of the medium— there’s never going to be a definitive scale that people can agree on for which all films can be judged.
Little known fact: A. A. Dowd’s real name is C. C. Dowd.
No, He is called A.A. Dowd because he is only allowed to give out 2 A’s a year
Wait, it’s not because he’s shitfaced when he hands out the ratings?
It’s a streamer. Have there been any straight-to-streaming movies that rose above a C+? Even the ones usually considered the best of the bunch—Roma, Manc, the Irishman—are definitely sub-par compared to their cinematic counterparts.I mean, streaming is the new straight-to-DVD.
I absolutely love me a “The world’s over/ending, but at least we’re together,” so I am expecting to fully love this
0:48 Johnny Walker Black Label the swirling clouds of Venus ten bottles on a shelf in a shop spy tradecraft this is from one month ago so whoever the Soviet spy was in Los Angeles they’re already dead the next shelf up is the oceans on Mars Johnny Walker Blue Label pretty pale blue bottle blue label some girl in Los Angeles’s favourite whisky she’s worn a dress in a photograph that looks just like it her in reply to the threat you should stop using rape and famine as weapons of war in Yemen Ethiopia and Sudan Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud it is strategically counterproductive and will get you and your military generals eliminated watching the useless fuckups from Britain France and America screw up everything they owned in the Middle East and North Africa for the last century should have taught you that “reap the whirlwind” blah blah blah let’s call it what it is a biological weapon that costs a few thousand dollars that will turn Saudi Arabia into a fucking graveyard in reply to how you are doing what you are doing just how fucking stupid are you and your generals trade money finance food water energy wealth that’s how you expand a empire
From the content of the review my take home message is that it’s kinda dull, with a few overt flaws. C+ sounds about right.
Did you watch the trailer? C+ looks spot on to me.
Fair question. I suppose I can conceive of a film with that description that wouldn’t seem pretty bland and unmemorable; it’s not an inherently unworkable concept. (Hell, there are post-apocalyptic comedies.) I think the issue here is that there’s an effort made at pathos but it’s constantly being undercut by goofiness. As if the film wants to be taken seriously but is also petrified of alienating anyone. Winds up as middling piffle.
The movie is plodding and terrible. The review is much kinder than it needs to be. Probably because it’s hard to hate Tom Hanks, and that hard-to-hateness comes through here.
“And while the dog’s admittedly adorable, Finch’s desire to ensure that it’ll be cared for after he’s gone doesn’t exactly make for high drama.” Tell me you’re not a dog person without saying “I’m not a dog person.”
I can do the opposite, by saying that I’m gonna have to consult the website “Does The Dog Die?” before I watch this.
was thinking the same thing. I have a lot of shit going on in my personal life, and not sure i can take a movie where the premise is the dog might die. Adult humans–i could give a shit–but not sure I’m in a place where kids or dog’s lives are at risk makes for a watchable movie for me
Exactly; adult humans have lived at least most of their lives, whereas seeing innocent kids and dogs/animals dying is not something I’d sign up to watch. The Drop with Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini (RIP) was probably the first modern movie where it was necessary for me to know if the dog I saw in the trailer was going to die before I watched the movie. John Wick came out later that year and if any movie would be well served by the “Does the Dog Die?” website, it’s that one.
I dunno, I like amiable low-key post apocalyptic movies better than the normal kind.
May I interest you in a little film called The Road?
Low-key— check.Post-apocalypse— check.Amiable– well, 2 out of 3 isn’t bad…
You’re a bad person and you’re going to the bad fire for that. (LOL)
I re-read The Road for the first time since it was published. I now have a young son about the age of the boy in the story. Holy shit did it hit different! At one point I was sobbing so hard I hyperventilated and my wife threatened to take me to the emergency room.
Kind of a turn-off that they didn’t have the guts to say humans wrecked the planet themselves, and it was an outside influence no one could have stopped.
“Why’d you name your dog “Volleyball”?
“Wilson” was already taken.
As opposed to, say… Hooch?
It said he needs to be fully protected to not get fried by the sun but both he and the dog seem to be outside and not covered.Should I repeat to myself “It’s just a Tom Hanks movie”?
They really missed out on a chance to reunite Hanks with a previous co-star, but apparently Hooch turned it down. Rumor has it that he wanted equal billing like he got in their last movie together.
I was thinking the same thing, but was sad to learn that the actor who played Hooch apparently died in 1992 at the unfairly young age of 14. Just a tragedy.https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1212798/
Typical Hollywood story. He couldn’t handle the success.
If it’s an RV movie, I probably will watch it. I generally like RV movies, except maybe RV. But Race With the Devil is terrific, and of course there’s the great Damnation Alley, which this resembles. (Okay, maybe Damnation Alley isn’t great, but then again maybe it is!)
It was great because the massive RV (the Landmaster) wasn’t a scale model — they literally created a giant working vehicle. It even has its own Wikipedia page separate from the movie!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmaster
(Okay, maybe Damnation Alley isn’t great, but then again maybe it is!) Well. The novel is great – it’s by Roger Zelazny, so that’s almost a guarantee. A story of the last Hell’s Angel on a suicide run across a post apocalyptic wasteland. The movie? Somehow, Hell Tanner has become First Lieutenant Jake Tanner, played by Jan Michael Vincent (voted -by me anyway – the actor Least Like a Hell’s Angel, and that was before he got on a fucking dirt bike at the end of the movie) and for some reason George Peppard has snuck in there too.But yeah actually, the vehicle was fucking amazing, as were the sky effects (for their time). I just wish they’d kept the fuck-it-anyway attitude the book and its hero had. Time for a remake, I would think. (And by the way, why the hell hasn’t someone snapped up the Amber books for a tv show? Has the world gone insane?)
I have read the book, so probably some of my affection for the movie is misplaced and belongs to Zelazny rather than to Peppard and company. But of course a healthy amount of it is reserved for that vehicle!
And I fully agree with you about those Amber books! I’m not a big TV watcher and probably would never see it, but they’re perfect for that format. Maybe in some alternate universe it and The Talisman are the big fantasy TV hits and people on the internet are wondering why Game of Thrones has never been adapted for the tube.
Oh, Talisman would be a great show. When it came out (probably before it came out) Spielberg had the rights sewn up. Glad that never happened, because that book is not a movie – it’s about a 15 or 20 episode series. Maybe someday (and not with Spielberg)…
Everyone loves Hanks, but let’s be real: He’s made plenty of bad films. Probably more bad films than good films.
Nah. For the most part even the least of his films are at most unremarkable. I haven’t seen everything he’s done but no real shitshows come to mind.
Yeah, I’m going to walk back my comment, because “unremarkable” is a better way of phrasing it. The Circle, Inferno, Ithaca, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Larry Crowne, Angels & Demons, Da Vinci Code, The Polar Express, The Ladykillers, plenty of his earlier films, etc, were all duds. My favorite Hanks film (who I love, make no mistake about that, he’s such an extremely lovable guy) was the Burbs, so what do I know? Not much.
Everyone loves Hanks, but let’s be real: He’s made plenty of bad films. Probably more bad films than good films. I guess that might be true -I haven’t seen all his movies and don’t want to rank the ones I have. But Hanks never, ever phones it in. He might be wrong for a part – I might have cast someone else as Sully Sullenberger, for instance – but he just do any role halfway. It helps that we know he likes his job apparently a nice guy, I suppose. The bad films is part of being a working actor.
Bachelor Party (1984) was a much better film when I was a horny teenager. It 8s all about (lack of) perspective.
I remember an SNL promo from back in the 90’s when Tom Hanks was hosting and Tom Petty was the musical guests. After some banter about both being named, they both start naming each other’s great works, then Tom Petty goes into, “The Burbs,” “Turner and Hooch,” “Joe vs. the Volcano,” or something like that (the Burbs and Joe are both great, so maybe not them). Maybe Hanks became more selective, but at least back then it seems his bad movies were more apparent; at least enough to joke about them.
Actually, not many since he hit it big with Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. The only one I am thinking of that has been “bad” and seen that way was the one where he played Walt Disney a few years ago
Finch, who presumably worked in robotics prior to the cataclysm, has
something more ambitious than Dewey in the works: a full-sized humanoid
companion, gifted with consciousness on par with our own.
Remember when, after Taken, every ageing leading man started demanding his own low-budget euro-action showcase? I guess Tom Hanks looked at Midnight Sky and demanded a middlebrow effects-heavy post-apocalypse snoozer of his own. Next up, Kevin Costner oh he did that in the 90’s you say?
He did that in the 90’s about seven times!
i could def face the apocalypse if i had a good dog with me.
It doesn’t seem like the tone the film goes for, but the concept of someone trying to create a robot to care for their dog after their death, since there’s no one else to do so, is about the most brutally depressing thing I can think of. BRB, gonna go hug my dog for an hour or so.
What’s up with him that the dogs going to outlive him?
Didn’t you read the review? HE HAS A COUGH!
It says he has an ominous cough.
Tom Hanks is under attack by goblins!*Tom Hanks uses Ominous Cough*
An aging diabetic living on canned goods. The robot amputates his feet in the third act.
See, I like yours better, but less imaginative people seem to think it must have something to do with the cough.
Embarrassed that this didn’t occur to me until now, but that’s (minus the robot) more or less the logline for Umberto D., which is one of my favorite films of all time. So it absolutely can be done more powerfully than it is here.
Not Jeff, Geoff.
K but does the dog die tho
Are terriers making a comeback? Will America reliquish their AirBud fixation for Benji?
Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition: most of the movie dogs of the silent 1920’s-30’s Westerns were Australian Shepherds.
Does that mean we’ll get a second season of Terriers?
Worrying about what will happen to pets should something terrible ever happen to us is certainly high drama in my world!
Holy shit, when that xylophone song from True Romance kicked in in the trailer it made the whole movie seem impossibly fucking twee.
It’s not a PG-13 remake of Hardware? Iggy’s not in this? Goddammit
This was just meh, to me. We really didn’t know what was going on and the loose plot of moving (he already had the Winnebago ready?) didn’t really help. Kinda reminded me of Chappie, but for the first time, I didn’t really like Tom Hanks. It’s a sad script that makes Tom Hanks seem kind of an asshole to a robot. I wonder if this is Hank’s payback for Greyhound? “We let you make your boat movie, Tom, time to payback Apple.”
God this was terrible.D’Angelo, I think you missed what they were doing with the robot. He started with the mannerisms of an infant (shaking hands over head celebrating something silly), and as he “grew up” his voice and posture etc changed. He wasn’t always sitting like a college student, he just ended up there.Not that that makes a damn bit of sense, but at least they were going for something and not just being sloppy.As annoyed as I was throughout the whole movie (the words “two hours I’ll never get back” went through my head at least a dozen times, yes I could’ve just turned it off), apparently I’m a sucker. Choked up the tiniest bit at the ending, then really enjoyed American Pie because how can you not?
I’ve just watched this film, and I have to say, I was charmed. Hanks, a dog, a silly robot – very little not to like. I guess you’re just mean, D’Angelo.