Tom Hanks may be easily one of the most beloved American actors working today. He’s probably the only guy who could have credibly played Mr. Rogers for a reason. But as anyone who has seen Turner and Hooch will tell you, it’s probably not gonna be a good sign for somebody in any movie that teams Hanks up with a dog.
I bring that up because as much as Turner and Hooch was largely played for laughs, 2021’s Finch was basically just Hanks, a robot, and a dog, and it’s a lot less amusing by design.
Inventor Finch Weinberg is living alone in a world severely damaged by a solar flare. Even short exposures to sunlight unprotected can instantly burn a man’s skin. He’s been finding what food and goods he can for himself by scavenging, and his only real companion is his dog Goodyear. He’s in the process of building a robot for reasons that he doesn’t quite reveal right away, but he has to cut that a bit short due to a storm that’s coming, one that will obliterate what’s left of his St. Louis home. As such, he has to hit the road in his protective RV and hope there’s a new place he and his small band can find shelter somewhere to the West. The robot, taking the name Jeff and voiced by actor Caleb Landry Jones, is a bit clumsy, but he has to learn fast. See, Finch knows he’s dying, and someone will need to care for Goodyear when he’s gone.
Told ya something bad is gonna happen to someone if Hanks is performing opposite a dog.
The movie itself is a slowly paced sort of thing that only gradually gives up its narrative secrets, and it’s whole success of failure does more or less rest on Hanks’s more-than-capable shoulders. His Finch is a man who lives mostly in fear. He doesn’t trust other people, and while there aren’t really any to see on screen, they do exist in this world and he has good reason to distrust them. That said, the movie does hint that Finch wasn’t exactly a people person even before the solar flare hit. He’s not a man who ever went very far geographically, and it would seem his general preference for machines over people may have been what kept him alive this long.
The movie ends in a rather improbable manner in many respects. There may be room in the world, if not for Finch, then for Goodyear and Jeff. As much as Hanks did his usual good job, his two costars were no slouches either. All that said, I wouldn’t call this a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. Oh, its fine, but at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be anything that I would go out of my way for. Movies like Finch are the sort that go for tears, and even if they get them, they seem to be rather obvious attempts to get them. The ending of this movie is, all things being equal, a little too pat given what came before it.
Grade: C+
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