The Terminal

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * )

The case of Merhan Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who has lived for 16 years at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and is no longer entirely of sound mind, is at heart a tragedy of refugee displacement.

Unsurprisingly, it has attracted the attention of film-makers but the only results have been a 1993 French farce starring Jean Rochefort and a 2001 mockumentary of which the maker says "if you've seen it, I probably know you".

I have seen neither but find it hard to imagine they could be worse than this saccharine and self-indulgent piece, which may be the worst film made by the most commercially successful film-maker in history.

The Terminal doesn't tell Nasseri's story, of course - it hijacks and adapts it into a shamelessly sentimental romantic comedy which is, at heart, deeply reactionary. It doesn't take much deconstruction to see this film as a manipulative and chauvinistic paean to America, the land of freedom beyond the terminal doors.

In any case, the storyline, co-written by New Zealand-born Andrew Niccol, is remarkably inept.

Hanks plays Victor Navorski, whose overnight flight to JFK has coincided with a revolution in his imaginary East European republic. The diplomatic chaos has left him in stateless limbo and he has to stay in the airport while the red tape is untangled.

We know all this because a reptilian Homeland Security official, Frank Dixon (Tucci), who has the words Bad Guy tattooed on his forehead (just kidding) explains it in the first reel, in rapid-fire sentences full of jargon which Victor plainly doesn't understand.

Never mind that he doesn't get the interpreter he promises. This is just the film's way of easing us into a story that plays out like a dozen episodes of a sitcom.

As Victor becomes a pawn in Dixon's improbable political manoeuvrings, we are treated to not one, but two flabby romantic subplots - one involving an otherwise hard-headed woman who happily gets engaged to a man she's never met, and the other between Victor and Amelia (Zeta Jones), a flight attendant so air-headed and feckless that United must deeply regret the product placement.

Inanities abound for lame comic effect (a machine that spits refunded quarters like bullets is the worst of many) and Victor keeps doing implausible stuff for no dramatic reason: you can't destroy even a bad suitcase by pushing gently on the lid; and even before September 11, airport work crews weren't leaving workshops and toolkits unsecured or signing up unknown newcomers for jobs.

The film coasts for much of its length on Hanks' considerable charm. But the story, which is really just a concatenation of banal comic incidents, is so utterly devoid of rhythm, conviction or dramatic coherence that it doesn't work even as escapist fantasy.

It is, at times, spellbindingly good-looking as Janusz Kaminski's cinematography finds an unearthly beauty in the scrupulously detailed set design. But it seldom raises a genuine laugh and never begins to touch the heart.

CAST: Tom Hanks, Stanley Tucci, Catherine Zeta Jones

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

RUNNING TIME: 128 mins

RATING: PG, adult themes

SCREENING: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas