What if Superman were an asshole? Not only an asshole, but a drunk as well? I’m sure that was part of the pitch for Hancock, a lackluster entry into the summer blockbuster season. This film, though not incompetent (it looks as bright and shiny as most other films that revolve around vehicles being tossed about like toys) fails to work as an exciting superhero thriller, as well as a meditation on the nature of immortality, which seems to be have impressed some critics.
Will Smith is the title character, a boozing malcontent who lives in a trailer and quite often sleeps on city benches, hungover and pissed off. He helps out the citizens of Los Angeles, but inevitably does so much damage (he drops an SUV full of machine gun-toting thugs on to the spire of the Capital Records building) that people wonder whether his efforts are worth it.
When Hancock ends up saving the life of a PR guy, Jason Bateman, he is thanked with a home-cooked meal. Bateman’s wife, Charlize Theron is naturally suspicious of the effect of the dipsomaniacal Hancock on her young son, but Bateman smells an opportunity. All Hancock needs is good publicity.
Yes, the first half of this film is all about the exciting world of public relations. I hope all of you can handle the rollercoaster ride! Bateman convinces Hancock to voluntary allow himself to be incarcerated, and then when crime goes up the city will turn to him to rescue them. Sounds like a pretty half-baked plan, but this being a dumb summer movie, it works like a charm.
Then the film takes a sharp turn, and becomes something else entirely. I won’t spoil it, but even with the humdrum nature of the first half, this turn is not welcome and really it’s downright silly. The film has no internal logic and has rules that seem to exist simply to accommodate the story twists. I suppose the climax of the film is supposed to be some big emotional pay-off, but all I could manage was a yawn.
There’s lots of blame to go around. Primarily it’s the script, which has all sorts of holes in logic and no particular point of view. The direction, by Peter Berg, is in the Michael Bay school of shit blowing up, and like Michael Bay, has no subtlety, originality or individuality. And as for Will Smith, well, a lot of people find him charming, but I am not one of them. An actor of incredibly limited range, he’s not particularly convincing as a cretin in the first half, or particularly likeable when he’s supposed to have changed. I just didn’t care anything about his character.
The end of the film suggests a sequel is possible, depending on the audience reaction. To which I say, to use a Smith catch-phrase, “Aw, hell no!”
Gone Elsewhere 
Ah, so it blows. Yeah, should probably skip it then. But I feel strangely drawn to it. Like passing the scene of an accident. Some primitive part of my brain is calling for me to see it.
I was shocked to actually be OK with it. Perhaps Poland was somewhat right? He suggested people see it again and, while I wouldn’t go that far, I would say that knowing it’s going to take a right-turn 2/3 of the way through certainly helped me. I read the original script which was just terrible, but it prepared me a little for Hancock’s behavior. Then I read summaries of the rewrites and knew what was going to happen. Then I read the reviews that hated it and assumed I would do the same.
But knowing all that at the hour mark, I waited for something horrible to happen. And it didn’t. I thought I was going to have egg on my face because I told my friends that the ending ripped the movie apart, but it didn’t for me. However, they knew nothing about the “twist” beforehand and came out going “eh…that’s not really what I expected.” They were completely underwhelmed by it. I expected the reactions to be opposite.
So, I wasn’t underwhelmed like I thought I would be, but this certainly isn’t the blockbuster we’re looking for. Merely a bad appetizer before the thrilling main course of The Dark Knight.
I should stress that my displeasure with this film started long before the twist. Part of me wanted to leave after about ten minutes. Everything about it was pushing me toward the door. The twist just made things worse.
To be fair, the first 10 or 20 minutes is almost identical to what’s in the trailers, so if you didn’t like the trailers, you won’t like how the movie begins.
But it wasn’t well put together. Everything just happened with no reasoning behind it. There was no big struggle to get Hancock to accept PR-man turning his life around. No real struggle to accept jail time. No real struggle to accept the super suit…etc etc…it feels drastically cut down.
Not sure I buy that, Joe. Trailers are not edited by the team that makes the movies, they are the responsibility of marketing, and in my mind, never a good indicator of whether I’ll like a movie. And the few times I saw the Hancock trailer (I didn’t see it too many times–I avoid trailers whenever possilbe) didn’t make me love it or hate it.
Yeah, funny that. Most of the high-profile trailers are done by a firm called the Ant Farm:
http://www.theantfarm.net
Their trailer for There Will be Blood is masterful.
Strange to me that a director wouldn’t have any input into the trailer, but…them’s the breaks in the business.
I didn’t keep a stopwatch, and sorry if this contains spoilers for anyone, but it seemed like Hancock went to jail somewhere at the 20 minute mark. It happened pretty fast, so what we got from the beginning was
LA Freeway Chase; Hancock hungover on bench;Kid tries to wake Hancock up;Annoying banter between Hancock and kid;Hancock blasts off;Rips ceiling off car;Bad guys shoot hancock;He puts their car on Capitol Records spire.
So far, this was just an extended version of what I saw in the trailer, with some Jason Bateman PR failure thrown in.
Next Hancock stops the train and gets chewed out by the crowd as in the trailer.He [literally] drops Bateman off at home, as in trailer. Charlize give him funny looks, as in trailer. Next day Hancock makes big hole in Bateman’s street, as in trailer. He throws “Michel” in the air and calls the kids “Thickness & Goggles”
Next we have the Youtube montage with the whale scene. Then it’s to jail with a quick stop to the press release. Followed shortly by the “if you don’t move, his head is going up your etc etc”
To me, this was basically everything the trailers the had shown with the exception of his super suit and interaction with lady cop (“Do I have permission to touch you”).
So that’s what I meant when I said the beginning was like the trailers. I wasn’t saying it directly for your benefit, but just as a general response to your comment. If it made you displeased that early on, I was adding that most of the beginning is found in the trailers. Therefore, if you didn’t like the trailers, you [general people reading this comment] would cringe in the first 10 – 20 minutes as well.
Just got back, and I think Jackrabbit Slim summed up my feelings with this:
It wasn’t the twist, per se, that bothered me, it was the way the story completely feel apart upon the introduction of a new wrinkle. I was actually with it up until the fight in the snowstorm (if you’ve seen it, you know what I mean), but that scene completely undermined the premise of the movie for me. Up until then, it had been all about the consequences of Hancock’s behavior in something meant to resemble the real world. But after that, Hancock kept breaking shit left and right but none of that mattered.
It’s just a complete loss of focus at the script level. There were interesting things that could have been done concerning “the twist,” but no one seems to have paid it any mind, and the movie becomes one random scene after another.
BIG SPOILER SECTION****************
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For example, the Theron character; she had been with Hancock for thousands of years. But after the Miami incident when Hancock lost his memory, and slowly spiraled down into a cycle of depression and destructiveness, she did … nothing? She was cool with that?
I mean, what did her character think about the whole superhero thing? Did she ever feel like she was ducking her responsibilities by marrying some PR schmuck and carrying on like she wasn’t a god on earth?
Coincidentally, I was watching some of Kill Bill on TV today, and caught the end, when Bill launches into his monologue about Superman and superhero alter egos. I liked the point he made about Clark Kent being Superman’s comment on humankind.
And I got to wondering, I wonder what the Theron character thinks of humankind. A better movie would have been about her and Hancock all along, instead of trying to shoehorn her into some kind of “twist” and completely ignoring the implications.
Probably the saddest commentary I can make is that, to me, the funniest part of the whole thing was when Mike Epps (I think it was Mike Epps) called him “Hand Jock” during the intra-credit sequence. It still makes me laugh….