JUST in case you have been on a desert island, this is the one where Tom Hanks gets seriously hairy while marooned on, well, on a desert island actually.

Chuck Noland (Hanks) is a time-obsessed FedEx employee, dedicated to getting the parcel delivered on time - by any means necessary. He flies all over the world instructing 'ignorant' foreigners in the company philosophy. (That they might find their own motivation isn't even a consideration.)

All of which is fine, but he is also fiercely committed to girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt) and can hardly bear the times they are separated - which is a lot of the time.

His manic pace of life slows to the point of stopping altogether when he is in a plane crash somewhere in the Pacific. He survives, but is left alone on an island with only a few old parcels and some wreckage for company. (Being a company man, of course, it takes him an age to open the parcels. And one of them remains unopened, coming to represent another reason to live: he will deliver it!)

He struggles, explores, gets his hopes of rescue dashed, injures himself, goes slightly mad and proves the ingenuity of the human spirit. Four years later he is still thinking, still talking out loud to an imaginary friend (that's handy - the script possibilities would otherwise be severely limited) and still able to picture Kelly.

Cast Away has many problems, not least that it is more about Chuck's physical journey when it wants to be about his emotional one. It takes an age to place Chuck on the island, endlessly reinforcing his lifestyle to the point where you start to play the various potential plots in your mind 20 minutes ahead of what's on screen. Chuck's trials on the island echo all the Robinson Crusoe scenarios you can think of, but the real interest should be in how a man who has lived like that can cope with being back in the modern world.

Not a problem, it seems. There are some cursory attempts to make a few points about the things we take for granted, but none of them are exactly revelatory. Does he deliver the parcel? What do you reckon?

Hanks does his best with what's available, but you can't escape the feeling that his reunion with Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis should have produced more. As it stands, watching Chuck's hair grow might have been a more favourable option.