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.