"Saving Private Ryan" Is Tom Hanks's Best Movie (2024)

In a way, it’s a testament to the overall quality of Hanks’ body of work that his worst movie isn’t some ghastly train wreck but rather just forgettable in its tapioca mediocrity. After playing so many aw-shucks, Jimmy Stewart paragons of virtue, Hanks gets the rare opportunity to play the villain here—a smarmy, drink-the-Kool-Aid tech visionary who’s like a cross between Steve Jobs and Marshall Applewhite. If his character had a mustache, he’d be twirling it. Unfortunately, director James Ponsoldt doesn’t push the idea far enough and doesn’t allow Hanks to be more than superficially evil. That said, I’m 100 percent convinced that one day Hanks will win an Oscar for playing a hissable, against-type bad guy.

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We can debate whether the world really needed another version of Pinocchio, but there’s no arguing that Disney and director Robert Zemeckis could’ve done a hell of a lot better than this. The digital effects render every character into a creepy, dead-eyed visitor an uncanny valley far, far away. Hanks and Zemeckis’ reunion from The Polar Express is a dull and soulless exercise in nostalgia. The good news is that as the lonely old toy maker Geppetto, Hanks gets to punch out and disappear for long chunks of the film’s running time. Lucky him.

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Tom Cruise has Mission: Impossible, Harrison Ford has Indiana Jones, and half of Hollywood’s leading men cash regular paychecks from Marvel. So why can’t a star of Hanks’s magnitude come up with a better franchise to guide than Dan Brown’s tepid Da Vinci-verse? (Yes, I know he also has the Toy Story movies, but for the sake of this list we’re only covering Hanks’s live-action films.) Watching the actor go through the motions as he runs through Florence trying to stop a madman from unleashing—checks notes…really, a computer virus?!—you not only get the sense that he deserves better, but that he knows he deserves better. He ain’t wrong.

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Look, I’m sure there were a ton of people praying for Hanks to reunite with Meg Ryan again. But I don’t think this sappy WWII melodrama is what they had in mind. Their fourth movie together (which Ryan also directed) is a slow and clunky series of missed opportunities as a sullen Hanks pops up in what amounts to an extended cameo playing Ryan’s plot device dead husband. Think of Ithaca as Ghost minus the pottery wheel.

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Released in the wake of Halloween, when there seemed to be a fresh slasher flick every weekend, Hanks’s big-screen debut is whatever the opposite of auspicious is. Watching it now, you’d never peg the young actor with the mop of curls (partially hidden by a proto-hipster teenie-weenie beanie) as a future back-to-back Oscar winner. A seat filler sounds more likely. Shot in exotic Staten Island over 15 freezing days, He Knows You’re Alone was released two months before Hanks would get his big break on the sitcom Bosom Buddies. This dull slasher flick is what paying your dues looks like.

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To be clear: When people say that they wish that Hollywood would go back to making movies like they used to, this is not what they mean. A Hitchco*ck-played-for-laughs, wrong-man thriller in which Dabney Coleman (who single-handedly saved many bad movies during his lifetime) mistakes a mild-mannered classical musician (Hanks) for a cunning international spy. I’ll be honest, this is the longest 93 minutes I’ve experienced in a long time. And if you thought Hooch was Hanks’s least talented (and jowliest) costar, I submit Jim Belushi.

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In the mid-‘80s, Hollywood was still having a hell of a time trying to figure out what lane Hanks belonged in. Was he a leading man or just the comic-relief second or third banana? Did he belong in low-brow laughers or high-brow dramas? Even he didn’t seem sure. Which helps to explain why the actor never looks even remotely comfortable in this schmaltzy WWII-era Casablanca wannabe set in Jerusalem.

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I’ll be honest: The Ladykillers is a tough one to rank. It’s a remake of a deliciously cruel Alec Guinness comedy from the ‘50s, but it’s probably also the least funny comedy that the Coen brothers ever made. With a frisky twinkle in his eye and an over-the-top Foghorn Leghorn accent, Hanks looks like he’s having a blast. And he probably is. But nothing about this movie works. At all. It’s like watching someone perform a stand-up routine at a wake.

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As chronicled in Julie Salamon’s shiv-wielding, diaristic takedown, The Devil’s Candy, Brian De Palma’s take on Tom Wolfe’s zeitgeisty ‘80s bestseller was an endless series of bad decisions and confounding casting choices. Exhibit A: tapping Hanks to play the Wall Street Master of the Universe and embodiment of ‘80s co*ck-swinging greed, Sherman McCoy. Hanks’s appeal has always been his salt-of-the-earth decency, not his reptilian misanthropy, so everything about his casting feels off. Bonfire was doomed before the director even called "Action!"

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For a minute there, after the delightful bubblegum pop of That Thing You Do!, it actually looked like Hanks might join the ranks of fellow stars-turned-directors Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Kevin Costner. At least until his sophom*ore outing behind the camera, Larry Crowne. Piggybacking on the misery hangover sparked by the 2008 financial collapse, Hanks plays a regular guy who gets pink-slipped from his job and tries to rebuild a simpler life, including a romance with Julia Roberts (how relatable!). Hanks’s saccharine long-distance dedication to struggling, everyday Americans is not only hopelessly out of touch, it’s as thin as a communion wafer.

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Ugh, more Robert Langdon/Da Vinci Code sound-and-fury nonsense. This time around, the Vatican enlists the floppy-haired Professor Hanks to get to the bottom of some nefarious Illuminati shenanigans. Hanks is in full Basil Exposition mode here, delivering a nonstop barrage of lines that are absolute howlers. Still, if watching cuckoo clergy types go rogue is your thing, by all means have at it. You can take solace in the fact that it’s slightly better than Inferno.

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It feels a little churlish to dogpile on a movie about a kid (Thomas Horne) who loses his father (Hanks) in 9/11 and tries to keep his memory alive by solving a mystery involving a key without a lock. But as well-intentioned as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is, it’s just not very good. Dripping with sappy, for-your-consideration Hallmark-card self-importance, Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestselling novel is extremely cloying and incredibly manipulative. It’s also so determined to make you cry that it feels like it’s prying open your tear ducts with a crowbar.

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After countless late-night viewings on HBO in the ‘80s, this Tom Hanks-Shelley Long screwball comedy about a pair of new homeowners at the mercy of a fixer-upper country house that refuses to be fixed up lives rent-free in my head. I’d love to figure out how to serve it with an eviction notice. While Hanks was undoubtedly a master of exasperated physical comedy during this chapter of his career (see the infinitely better Splash), the film’s gags have not aged very well. I don’t think I can do any better than Roger Ebert’s pan of this one, especially when he called it “a movie that contains one funny scene and 91 minutes of running time to kill.”

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With an admittedly small sample size, it seems like Hanks hasn’t quite figured out how he wants to navigate 2020s yet. I think we’d all like to see a star of his wattage carefully select one great film a year and knock it over the fence. But he’s been making some puzzling choices, like this post-apocalyptic trifle about a lonely survivor, his dog, and his annoying robot. There’s a version of this Apple TV+ movie that unspools like The Road-meets-Cast Away. But this ain’t that. Rather, this is a disappointingly, weirdly inert drama that aims to peddle uplift but just spins its sentimental wheels.

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Before sitting down to rewatch the Hanks filmography and tackle this list, I wouldn’t have guessed that we’d still be hip-deep in forgettable movies at No. 40. The actor’s highs are really high, but there are more lows than I remembered. In this harmless Broadway Danny Rose-esque trifle about a past-his-prime mentalist, John Malkovich and Colin Hanks get the bulk of the movie’s screen time. Hanks Sr. briefly swings by to lend a dose of his signature charisma and briefly sparks the film to life, but when he disappears so does any reason to keep on watching.

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Some more aggressively mediocre 2020s amnesia-bait from Hanks (see The Great Buck Howard). Coming out of the pandemic, I don’t think anyone was especially psyched to see Hanks in cynical curmudgeon mode. But hey, you play with the cards you’re dealt. A remake of a 2015 Swedish import about a redeemable aging crank, this feels like some producer came in and pitched “a blander version of Jack Nicholson’s As Good as It Gets.” On those terms (and those terms only), it’s a resounding success.

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I must admit, I enjoyed this a lot more on my recent viewing than when it originally hit theaters. Back then, Hollywood was awash in Boomer TV adaptations and there was something that still felt cynical about Nick at Nite IP mining. Now, everything is mined IP, so it feels less objectionable. (How’s that for depressing logic?) Dan Aykroyd’s rat-a-tat riff on just-the-facts, deadpan detective Joe Friday works. And Hanks, as his sarcastic partner in investigating an LA pagan cult, adds comic crackle. It may only be a rung or two above the Police Academy movies, but sometimes just a rung or two makes all the difference.

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I’m sure some ‘80s kids will think that this one should be ten slots higher and some will think that it should be ten slots lower, but No. 35 feels about right to me. In the glorious year of our lord, 1989, Hollywood coughed up two competing cop-partners-with-dog flicks. There was Jim Belushi’s K-9 (yup, him again) and this buddy comedy pairing Hanks with a slobbery French mastiff (real name: Beasley). Of the pair, this one remains the pick of the litter, thanks to Hanks’ wonderfully apoplectic and put-upon reaction shots. Is it dumb? Is the ending a downer? Yup. But if it comes on TV on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I’m putting down the remote until further notice.

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I’m not sure this one works entirely, but it is interesting. Hanks plays a caffeinated, high-powered ad exec who eventually comes to realize that he needs to connect with his ailing, cranky dad (Jackie Gleason) before it’s too late. As directed by the ever-schmaltzy Garry Marshall, the estranged father-and-son stuff is treacly and laid on with a trowel. It feels like the movie version of a Cat Stevens ballad. But at the time, it foreshadowed Hanks’ (mostly) seamless transition from comedy to drama.

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