by MATTHEW HAYS

That director Steven Spielberg has had his career ups and downs is pretty much a given, but The Terminal really does set a new standard in the auteur-gone-terribly-wrong department. I mean, this film is really bad, on every level.

The script was inspired by the true story of an Iranian exile who ended up stranded in the Paris airport for years due to political turmoil in his native country. Without the proper papers, he was effectively stripped of the right to travel freely and had to remain within some lounge boundaries.

It's an intriguing premise for a movie - the existential crises such a person would face are daunting (not to mention their survival techniques). But forget that potential: here, terminally cutesy Tom Hanks plays someone from a fictional former Soviet bloc country who can barely speak a word of English. He wants to get to Manhattan, but as his country has collapsed under a coup his passport is rendered useless. Enter Stanley Tucci, who's way above this material, playing the Bad Bureaucrat. Hanks, doing a terrible Cossack accent, does his best to survive in what feels like a tepid rerun of Cast Away - putting together free ketchup and cracker packs to make a meal, adjoining uncomfortable furniture to form a makeshift bed, and so on.

Then the yuks start arriving, with the film adopting a strain of realism generally reserved for episodes of dimwitted sitcoms like Gilligan's Island or I Dream of Jeannie. Hanks manages to get work with a construction crew at the airport, plays matchmaker for a smitten couple of single working stiffs (they get married in the terminal!) and even embarks on a romance himself (with Catherine Zeta-Jones, a heartbroken flight attendant).

Somehow, things manage to get even worse. This film is a case study in all of the most evil things about Spielberg - namely, his tendency to succumb to the maudlin. The Terminal gets jaw-droppingly bad on this count - the very worst scene happening when one well-meaning East Indian airport maintenance man valiantly rushes out to halt a taxiing plane - with his mop! (I'm not making this up - wish I were.) The Terminal constitutes a crash landing, beyond any reasonable doubt.

The Terminal opens Friday, June 18

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