Review: Tom Hanks, a robot and a dog in ‘Finch’

In the new Apple TV+ film “Finch,” Tom Hanks plays a robotics engineer who is living alone in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, dying from radiation exposure and desperately trying to make sure his dog will be taken care of when he’s gone

Tom Hanks doesn’t need a human or even a sentient acting partner to make a film or a scene sing. Think Wilson the volleyball, Hooch and even that laptop from “You’ve Got Mail.” So it’s not at all surprising if he’s the first guy on the list for your post-apocalyptic film about a man, a robot and a dog.

Even less surprising is that Hanks delivers in “ Finch,” playing a robotics engineer who is dying from radiation exposure and desperately trying to make sure his dog will be taken care of when he’s gone. It’s the kind of premise that’s been designed to pull at your heartstrings. Dying Tom Hanks and a cute pup? It's impossible to resist. And yet somehow it doesn’t work as the epic it would like to be.

The story started out as a 20-page short about a man who builds a robot to replace him as a dog’s caretaker from a film student named Craig Luck. He wanted it to be a calling card and despite some initial rejections, his last name proved apt since his idea charmed Ivor Powell, the associate producer on “Blade Runner” and “Alien,” who co-wrote the feature, Robert Zemeckis, who produced, Hanks, “Game of Thrones” director Miguel Sapochnik and a major Hollywood studio (although Universal ended up selling the film to Apple TV+ during the pandemic).

Here, Earth has been rendered a dusty wasteland after a solar event destroyed the ozone layer now direct sunlight is the most dangerous thing in the world. It cooks any living thing within moments of being exposed.