Directed by Miguel Sapochnik
Written by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell
Starring: Tom Hanks, Caleb Landry Jones
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour and 55 minutes
Premieres November 5 on Apple TV

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

The primary aim of Finch is to offer the viewer a kinder, gentler post-apocalypse. I’m sure a lot of folks are burnt out by the recent rash of post-apocalyptica, so it makes sense that some intrepid filmmaker would come along and attempt to turn the genre on its head. While the world of Finch is far from hospitable—here, the world ends when a solar flare shreds the ozone layer, effectively turning the surface of the planet into an Easy-Bake Oven —there are no roving hordes of zombies, no pointy-toothed mutants, and no dudes strapped to the front of a killdozer shredding an electric guitar that shoots flames out of the headstock. There’s a tiny flashback that illustrates how scavenging humans turned on each other, depicting an act of violence, but otherwise the only characters we ever see on screen are Tom Hanks’ Finch, his dog Goodyear, and his robot dog-sitter Jeff (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones). It’s The Road without all the grimness and brutal violence. It’s A Boy and His Dog without all the weird sex. It’s a movie where you sit around waiting for something to happen and it never does.

The main problem with Finch is that it takes a short story premise and balloons it out to nearly two-hours. I can give you the entirety of the plot in a single sentence: Robotics engineer living in post-apocalyptic wasteland builds a robot to take care of his dog for when he eventually succumbs to apocalypse-induced cancer. That’s not a horrible premise, but that’s eight pages of prose, tops (and even that may be pushing it). There’s enough structure that, with the right screenwriters, you could hang some interesting themes about the nature of humanity, mortality, and togetherness and some fresh ideas for the post-apocalyptic genre on the bones and end up with a solid little addition to the genre. Some sort of crazy apocalypse storm arrives and Finch and company are forced to evacuate their little midwestern lab and hit the road for greener pastures. “Cool! I bet we’re going to see some stuff on the road that fleshes out this story!” I thought. Nope. Finch wants you to think it has big emotions and big ideas about humanity, but it has no ideas, new or otherwise, and you get as much out of reading the film’s logline as you do slogging through two hours of Tom Hanks trying to teach a robot to be human and yelling at it when it messes up.

Hanks, to his credit, is at least someone you can trust to carry a movie on his own. OK, maybe Wilson from Castaway would beg to differ, considering that blood-smeared volleyball carried a lot of the emotional weight of that film, but that’s neither here nor there. The problem with this setup though is that if you’re going to make a movie with exactly one human character, that character better damn well be interesting, and Finch is not interesting. Maybe this works if the robot he is building to take care of his dog when he dies is interesting, but get this, the robot isn’t interesting either! Poor Jeff the robot spends the whole movie learning how to be human enough to take care of his creator’s dog and doesn’t really get much time to push against Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics or anything fun like that. Jeff is sympathetic, sure, but it’s that overly sentimental sympathetic that prevents you from creating any kind of emotional attachment to the character. You know who didn’t have that problem? Wall-E. And Wall-E couldn’t even talk! I can’t help but feel like this movie would work better if the robot was being trained to take care of its creator’s child. That adds some real stakes to the story and you lose the lightheartedness this film dabbles in, but you can’t deny that that at least gives this story some stakes. You just can’t mine that emotional weight from a dog.

And look, I’m a dog person. The sort who saw the trailer for A Dog’s Purpose before some kids’ movie and my 7-year-old had to ask me if I was OK because of all the tears running down my face. While I’m sure the canine actor who plays Finch’s dog Goodyear is a good boy in real life, he has the same sort of blandness as everything else in this movie. Did I want to come out here and ether a dog in this review? No, I did not. Your mileage may vary if you grew up with the sort of Irish Terrier mix that Goodyear appears to be, but I’m only half joking when I say that there are way more sympathetic dog breeds out there. I mean, a Golden Retriever is probably a hack, but they at least have tons of charisma. How about a beagle, or some sort of pit bull mix! I’m just saying that despite what Hollywood folks may think, dog casting isn’t a one-dog-fits-all sort of thing. Again, this isn’t the dog’s fault, considering that all he does is lay around and whimper in the RV when Finch and Jeff go on away missions.

You have to wonder what kind of filmmaker can screw up something as simple as having a cute and lovable pupper as one of a film’s primary characters and plot devices. While a more sympathetic dog could have been cast (apparently this is the hill I’m going to die on), I’ll take some of the blame off director Miguel Sapochnik. Sapochnik’s only other feature film directing credit is the 2010 Jude Law vehicle Repo Men. He has spent the intervening 11 years becoming an award-winning TV director. His work on Game of Thrones won him an Emmy and given his truly excellent work on the small screen, it makes sense that Hollywood would come calling. While the post-apocalypse of Finch is pretty ho-hum, nuts and bolts end-of-the-world fare, he and the effects department did a great job creating a robot that looks awesome. Jeff has a handmade quality that you don’t see in a lot of sleek movie androids, and though Jeff can talk, it is his subtle movements that really sell his personality (no offense to Caleb Landry Jones). Most importantly, Jeff feels like a practical effect, and that is no mean feat.

The biggest issue with Finch is that the screenplay is wholly uncurious. Craig Luck and Ivor Powell’s script only strives to get from point A to point B in the most streamlined way possible and hope that the premise is enough to get the thing greenlit. OK, maybe that’s an overly cynical take, but it’s hard to express just how much of a nothing this screenplay is. It reads like something an AI would write. Honestly, had an AI written this movie it would have at least been an interesting hook, because as it stands, this movie is desperately trying to talk about the meaning of capital H Humanity and has none of that traditional warmth and emotion that humans are known for (well, some of us anyway).