TOM HANKS TANKS….AGAIN

Tom Hanks

How the mighty have fallen! It wasn’t so long ago that Tom Hanks was one of the world’s top box office stars. Any movie he was in was a sure fire bet to make money. But now…oh dear! It seems the Forrest Gump star can’t do anything right nowadays. His new movie, the overlong and overly-complex Cloud Atlas is the latest box-office bomb for the Oscar-winner. It seems the sceptics who doubted that a worthwhile movie could be made from David Mitchell’s novel, which encompasses six stories over a span of 500 years, were right. On its opening weekend Cloud Atlas came in third at the box -office, behind Argo in its third week of release, and the horror movie Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.

Hanks’ roles include a scheming doctor on board a voyage across the Pacific in 1849, a trash-talking novelist in contemporary London and a peaceful goatherd who is part of a post-apocalyptic tribe in the 2300s. None of them are very interesting and critics have reserved particular scorn for his attempts at a Cockney accent in one section.

His last two movies, the 9/11 drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Larry Crowne, which he both directed and starred in, couldn’t even manage $40 million apiece.

Cloud Atlas, which cost way north of $100 million and comes from the Wachowskis, who haven’t made a good movie since 1999’s Matrix, is not expected to do much better,

Hanks has to look back three years to Angels and Demons, the flop-proof sequel to The Da Vinci Code, for his last live-action hit.