Once upon a time, some bit of bureaucratic bungling left an Iranian man stranded at Charles de Gaulle airport. He lived there for some years, no doubt relying upon the kindness of strangers to survive.

A version of this tale is told in The Terminal, a film that stars Tom Hanks as an Eastern European man forced to live at a New York airport.

Hanks plays one Viktor Navorski, a guy from the vaguely Russian land of Krakozhia. It isn't a real country, which is how you know that Viktor is going to be the foreign-figure-of-fun-with-a-heart-of-gold.

Viktor gets caught in a web of red tape. He cannot leave the airport.

Okay: What to do?

He quickly creates a place to live in a deserted part of the airport, learns to speak English, makes a pack of new friends, plays Cupid for a buddy, gets a great job, falls in love with a beautiful flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones), creates art, becomes a hero and a leader of men and inspires dozens to lay their jobs on the line for him and his noble pursuit of ... a musician's autograph.

You really have to see it to believe it.

The Terminal is so wrong from top to bottom -- fabulously ill-conceived, woefully miscast, horribly written, xenophobic, over-long and just plain stupid -- that it's actually fun to watch.

The airport that becomes home to Viktor looks like one endless product placement, a loving advertisement to Burger King, Border's Books and S'barro.

Viktor's experience is meant to be the immigrant experience in microcosm. And America, according to The Terminal, is all about consumerism and immigrant ingenuity when it comes to finding shortcuts to consuming, except when it's about petty bureaucrats trying to keep those crafty immigrants out of the country.

Saddled with a ridiculous accent and required to convey a genuine interest in other people -- the one trait no American thespian can pull off -- Hanks is left to struggle with dreadful material.

Mostly, the dreadful material defeats him. Around and about Hanks and his misguided pratfalls, however, are some pleasant performances.

Catherine Zeta-Jones is entirely watchable as a damaged romantic.

And as a paranoid airport cleaner, Kumar Pallana steals every scene he's in.

Otherwise, The Terminal is overwrought and self-indulgent. It's also vindicating for anyone who finds the whole sainted Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks pairing to be wildly overrated.

(This film is rated PG)

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