Review of A Hologram for the King (2016) by Jude V — 04 Sep 2016

I had seen the trailer for the movie and it gave me quite high expectations for it. The story is interesting and Tom Hanks movies are rarely disappointing. Yet I found myself disappointed by the movie as it only left me with a frustrating sense of unsatisfaction and this constant hovering tingle of utter confusion .

Many plot points are created and then never addressed again throughout. The plot points that the movie did keep up with tried to weave a story together and did it quite poorly, as nothing felt connected.

.. Everything in the movie just seemed unfinished and the plot felt undercooked. The movie had very little visual appeal, it looked more like a Dubai hotel commercial than a box office film. There is one scene in the movie where Tom Hanks is left abandoned at a hotel in construction for no clear reason and walks in on men, presumably criminals or very drunk construction workers, fighting in a brawl or like a fight ring type thing.

This felt very important but that scene is neither mentioned again by anyone in the movie nor explained later on by anything or anyone at any point. It's just a very weird movie that does not leave you satisfied and, despite its passability as a fairly interesting film, feels like a very amateurish film completed in a hurry and without much ambition for story coherence.