The end of the world may never have had less impact than it does in Miguel Sapochnik’s Finch, which tries to recapture the man-against-nature drama of Cast Away (Robert Zemeckis is one of its producers). But for a film that mostly plays out as a two-hander between a robot and his maker, it’s a mostly limping and curiously lighthearted affair.
Finch (Tom Hanks) is a man possessed of a tinkerer’s buzzing curiosity, an engineer’s problem-solving dedication, and a jaunty way of handling the fact that he might be the only human left on Earth. It makes a kind of sense, in that he’s holding despair at bay while pursuing a task with single-minded devotion. Once that task is made clear, though, you may start to wonder whether the whole film would have been more enjoyable if Finch had simply gone raving mad rather than hang on to his distinctly Hanksian smiling-through-the-grit determination.
Finch shows us next to nothing about what came before the collapse of human society, which appears to have been brought about by a combination of solar flares and human conflict. We first see Finch, who lives deep underground in a fortified lair away from the scouring winds and burning sun, stalking through a raging sandstorm in a jerry-rigged astronaut suit that protects him not just from the particle clouds and torrid heat, but the skin-scorching UV light flooding down through an ozone-less atmosphere. Though his task involves picking for food in a long-ransacked store filled with desiccated corpses, he’s fairly blasé about the whole thing, whistling “American Pie” as he works and having a one-sided chat with Dewey, his robot dog.
Believing that he’s likely to die soon—the man’s coughing fits regularly produce spatters of blood—and being apparently quite the crackerjack robotics developer, Finch has spent the past decade in his lair building a new robot companion. But the humanoid robot isn’t meant to keep Finch company. Rather, he’s designed it to have the smarts and capabilities not possessed by the simple-minded Dewey to take care of his flesh-and-blood dog Goodyear after Finch passes away. Extremely strong, programmed with Finch’s variation on Asimov’s three laws of robotics, and packed with several libraries’ worth of data, the robot is also clumsy, temperamental, and eager to please. He’s voiced by Caleb Landry Jones with a vulnerability that would be more affecting were the emotions and humor not so trite.
Craig Luck and Ivor Powell’s script essentially grafts a 1980s-style friendship tale between an android and human onto a post-apocalyptic road-trip scenario a la Damnation Alley, with a dash of WALL-E thrown in. Not long after “Jeff” (the name that the robot picks out for himself) comes online, Finch discovers that a storm of biblical proportions is heading his way. He, Jeff, and Goodyear head west in an RV through a geographically confused America (apparently there are towering mountains just outside Springfield, Missouri), fighting to survive the elements while Finch races against the clock to bond Jeff and Goodyear before he dies.
As the film bumbles between spotty special effects scenes and cutesy pratfalls, Hanks does solid-enough work revealing his character as less of a loveable old grump than a misanthrope who never had much interest in humans before the apocalypse and is now only able to relate to a machine of his own making. But there’s only so much that the actor can do to overcome cheeseball dialogue like “I know you were born yesterday, but it’s time for you to grow up!”
As the film is largely comprised of Hanks reacting to robotic clumsiness or verbal malapropisms in a world practically devoid of humans (a threatening car briefly follows the RV but nobody is ever seen), it’s perhaps inevitable that it has difficulty kicking into gear. In the end, the filmmakers settle for giving Finch and Jeff a handful of unthrilling challenges to overcome on their journey, only to then cap things off with a third-act reveal about their destination that aims for optimistic uplift but comes across as irritatingly nonsensical.
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