I love Tom Hanks. So much. He is my favorite actor of all time, and will likely go down in history as one of the best. That is why it is so hard for me to write a negative review for the highly anticipated Clint Eastwood directed film, “Sully.” But there are  just too many missteps with this  film to be able to make this review anything but negative.

“Sully” tells the true story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger, a veteran commercial air pilot who, after a double engine failure on an otherwise routine flight, is forced to land his  plane in the middle of the Hudson River. Miraculously, there are no casualties.

The movie isn’t all bad. In fact, the scenes depicting the plane crash were terrific and give viewers not only a sense of the horrific nature of the flight but also the immense number of things that just happened to occur at the right time for everyone to be rescued. There are subtleties to Hanks’ performance as Sully that depict a man haunted by the traumatic events he has just experienced, and one unequipped to handle the constant dogging of the media.

Aside from  Hanks, who does the best he can with the sub-par material he was given to work with, there are  no other standout performances. Every other character is either underdeveloped or feels fake and one dimensional. Much of that is due to the script, which has no nuance or emotion. The casting did not help either, with several small-time actors floundering on  the big stage.

In terms of the Eastwood canon, “Sully” is a far cry from “Mystic River” or, in recent memory, “American Sniper,” which had everything that this film was lacking: emotion, tension, and realism. The whole movie feels artificial. The lighting in some scenes is just too perfect for your hotel room, and the set design of the many conference rooms and hotel rooms feel like they are trying too hard to be real.

The minor characters and extras in this movie are written so poorly that I wanted to simultaneously laugh and groan. The writer Todd Komarnicki seemed to hope that the movie would gain drama from the story itself, and in some scenes, it does, but he is not able to sustain the other 75 minutes of this 90 minute feature.

As I write this review I am watching “Captain Phillips,” a film that is easily comparable to “Sully” and is likely the reason that Tom Hanks was chosen for this role. In both films Hanks plays an everyman captain struck by a freak disaster. In the end he has to make a life threatening choice for the good of his crew, and he comes out clean on the other side, hailed as a hero. The stories that both films are based on have a similar overall arc, but the resulting films come out very differently.

The reason is because of the way that each film tries to tell the story. “Captain Phillips” is the recounting of the fateful run in with a crew of Somali pirates. It tells the story concisely and effectively. “Sully,” on the other hand, attempts to tell the story of what happened, Sully’s emotional response to the events of the crash, the hearing determining whether he could’ve made it back to the airport, and also give a little backstory of the captain’s life experiences with aviation. And all in 90 minutes.

The film is confused as to where it wants to jump to next, cutting from a hearing scene to flashing back to the day of the crash, then to another flashback about Sully learning to fly, and after that to  a dreamlike sequence lifted straight out of “Birdman” where he sees his plane crashing in the middle of Manhattan. Perhaps “Sully” might have been more effective if it had just focused on one of these aspects. Instead, it just does a little bit of everything, and nothing feels explored to satisfaction.

In the end, “Sully” feels like a cheap grab at an Oscar, using the well known story of an everyday hero to get box office sales. With the legendary Hanks – Eastwood combo, it’s thoroughly disappointing to see the bloated, underwhelming final product that is this movie.