“And you may ask yourself: how did I get here?” After a heavily trailed Once in a Lifetime opening which promises snappy, sassy, satirical thrills, this midlife crisis movie (from Dave Eggers’s bestselling novel) settles into an altogether more sappy stride. Tom Hanks is Alan, an IT salesman in the wake of a messy divorce, dispatched to Saudi to sell a virtual-reality system in a city that hasn’t yet been built by a king notable by his absence. Stranded in the desert, penning plaintive missives to his daughter, Alan starts to unravel, blaming his woes on a growing lump on his back, which comes to symbolise his inner sickness. Flashbacks to his home life rub shoulders with a more general malaise about outsourcing home industries to China in this peculiar melange of the personal, the political and the parodic. Alexander Black makes some dramatic headway as Alan’s driver-cum-guide Yousef, while Sarita Choudhury breathes life into blossoming romantic subplot which proves the film’s most intriguing feature. As for Hanks, he does a nice line in hassled everyman, but can’t quite inject an element of magic into Tom Tykwer’s movie, even when coincidentally reprising a touchstone scene from Splash.
