A Hologram for the King (2016)
Alan Clay, a struggling American businessman, travels to Saudi Arabia to sell a new technology to the King, only to be challenged by endless Middle Eastern bureaucracy, a perpetually absent monarch, and a suspicious growth on his back.
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Pretty Good
Great Film overall
A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
FIrst, great job Mr Hanks and the whole team! Second, I love to see religions being openly and politely/nicely/lovingly challenged into pondering how sometimes they kill everything that is human in us. Nothing brutal here, so fear not and proceed. Third.... showing love is perhaps a virtue we need more than anything in our modern hectic society. I say that in regard to all the unthinking, senseless, sad and unreasonable amount of HATE people unleash out there, and in regard to the NEGATIVE comments on this movie - PLEASE DON'T MIND THEM, just watch this really nice decent lovely piece, and judge for yourself, or better yet, let yourself be taken on a nice Hanks ride, give judgement a break for once :) . I will say no more. Enjoy!
11:23 of watching and there is a lot of wrong in this movie. Mostly cultural.
I really liked this movie, but I understand it is culturally distasteful and Hollywood's way of mocking the Saudi Arabian culture. Your common sense tells you there would be not bikinis in a store's window display. No Saudi Arabian woman, married or otherwise,would go snorkeling topless when the risks of getting caught is death. So even though the SA doctor and Tom Hanks have chemistry and a cute romance, it's completely implausible. As far as the Embassy party scene, the illegal booze, drug use, and business professional hooking up in private, that happens behind closed doors yet it was insulting to Muslims for them to include it even though I thought the scenes were interesting. Yet, I enjoyed this movie and seeing middle aged love besides a sixty year old man hooking up with a bubbly twenty something. Hank's character struggle is realistic like many Americans are facing now trying to keep their head above water drowning in debt,dwindling job opportunities, stagnant pay, lack of job security, outsourcing, and constant of uncertainty. His character was very relatable struggling with the disappointments in his life and trying to continue to feel alive in an ever changing world. I loved the scenery of Saudi Arabia, the exotic deserts, the beautiful women even covered up in their hijabs, the beautiful white sand beaches, large spacious homes, it's like their living like kings in the desert. It was a beauty movie to watch with exotic locations and one of my favorite scenes is when he meets the SA businessman giving him a taste of the SA wealth. No it's completely accurate and devout Muslims will find this movie insulting because of the vices shown. Yet, I enjoy this fantasy of a movie mixed with reality of living in a global unpredictable world.
The only reason I chose to watch this was because it featured Tom Hanks and I needed to fill an hour and a half while on the treadmill. The plot is boring beyond belief. If this movie has any purpose at all, it is merely to show how stupid westerners can be when traveling to vastly different cultures. It's hard to feel sorry for Americans who get captured while hiking in Iran because they thought it would be cool, or an American dimwit student who steals a poster in North Korea and gets sentenced to 15 years at hard labor. Similarly, it was hard for me to feel sorry for Hanks' character, who must have experienced 20 such moments in this film. Other than these lessons, I don't think the film had any redeeming qualities, and it certainly was not funny at all.