Hologram for the King Not Destined to be a Classic

 

 

 

 

A Hologram for the King (2016)

Directed by Tom Tykwer

Lionsgate, 97 minutes, R (nudity, language, drug/alcohol use)

★

 

Sometimes when you’ve never even heard of the movie you’re about to watch, it’s because it’s a sparkling independent film made outside the corporate hype machine. Other times, it’s because the films stinks like a skunk with gas. A Hologram for the King falls into the latter category. It was made on a $35 million budget–chump change these days–and only recouped a third of that. The reason it survives on DVD and Kanopy can be explained in two words: Tom Hanks.

 

The tag line for this one could be: “Community Theater Does Death of a Salesman in the Desert.” Hanks plays Alan Clay, who once worked in sales for Schwinn and oversaw the layoff of most of the workforce when bicycle production was outsourced to China. He’s now shilling (but not selling) holographic teleconferencing networks, a job he got because he once met the nephew to the king of Saudi Arabia. It would be quite coup if Alan could land a lucrative Saudi contract.

 

Clay is, however, a mess. He has undergone an acrimonious and expensive divorce, harbors guilt from what happened at Schwinn, is under pressure to sell or be fired, can’t afford his daughter’s college tuition, and has the self-confidence of your average milquetoast. He only briefly met the powerful Saudi nephew at a large conference, but he’s being sent to Saudi Arabia to pitch his company’s holographic wares. Are you laughing yet at the setup for this comedy/drama/romance?

 

No? I’ll bet you could have written a better script! What’s on the screen is shocking considering it was based on a work by Dave Eggers. Clay gets to Saudi Arabia but misses the shuttle from Jeddah to the King’s Metropolis of Economy and Trade (KMET). He has to hire a driver. Yousef (Alexander Black) is a bit wacked, talks a mile a minute, is part of the unsanctioned underground economy, and is in love with the daughter of a rich family that forbids their match. Ha ha. The KMET is an elaborate but barren shell in the desert that might or might not turn into something. Alan’s team is ensconced in a tent that lacks, well, everything: Internet, food, furniture, air conditioning, beds, a local contact…. Alan has encounters with a receptionist in the one building that’s operational. Her job seems to be to keep Alan uninformed.

 

Back at the hotel he can’t even drown his troubles. It’s Saudi Arabia, so no alcohol. He meets Hanne, a horny Danish woman who gives him a bottle of olive oil. Why is she Danish? Because the movie was made by an international consortium. I suppose it could have been worse, as the Cayman Islands also took part in this camel wreck. Can you guess what’s inside the olive oil bottle? Stop it! These jokes are killing me!

 

Each morning Alan oversleeps and needs Yousef to take him the KMET where… nothing happens. He finally circumvents the receptionist, finds his contact working in an unfinished condo complex at the KMET and scores stuff for his team. Now for the really hysterical part; Alan has a gross bump on his spine. I’ll spare those details because it’s a setup for him to meet Dr. Zahra Haken (Sarita Choudhury).  You know what they say, there’s nothing like a potentially cancerous lump to make a Saudi woman fall for you. Except, of course, Choudhury isn’t Saudi; she’s Bengali British, though she’s cute in her chador and quite lovely out of it. If you think that might be a tad culturally insensitive, in one of Yousef’s Driving Mr. Alan episodes he misses an exit and drives a robed Clay through Mecca, a gag roughly as offensive as farting in the Vatican. I assume Mecca is stock footage as the movie was actually filmed in Morocco and Egypt.

 

There is so much more this film could have been about–believable cultural misconnections and a more nuanced look at growing Chinese economic dominance to name two–but instead we get love at a beach house. At every juncture where director Tom Tykwer could have made an intelligent comedy he opted for the obvious no matter whose culture he had to belittle. I could go on, but this has already taken more time than you should devote to watching this film, Rated R for rancid. 

 

Rob Weir