Hancock

Hey, did anyone notice those tornadoes?

2008

Review: July 8, 2008

Director: Peter Berg

Starring: Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman

Eh, whatever.

THE SETUP:

Reluctant superhero, then a lot more unrelated complications.

DISCUSSION:

This movie vexed me from the start. First, for many months, there was just the poster of Will Smith’s face, showing nothing else but the title. I’m like; “So, WHY should I want to see this movie? All you have to tell me is that Will Smith is in it.” Of course, that may be enough for some. I was fairly indifferent on it—I mean, I’m always up to watch some wanton destruction—but then the reviews started coming out. Most of them said it was a dreadful mess, but within those were some very positive ones that found it to be an admirable failure, a movie that could have been much greater than it was—well, if only it weren’t such a dreadful mess. And you know what? They’re both kind of true.

We open with a high-speed chase on the freeways of L.A. Meanwhile, Hancock is sleeping drunk on a park bench. Some kid wakes him and shows him the chase on TV, walking off and calling him an asshole. Hancock haphazardly flies over to the chase, and this is what you’ve seen in the trailer where he impales their SUV on the top of the Capitol Records building. The city and the police don't like this because he caused $9 million in damage while doing it.

Then Jason Bateman as Ray is trying to convince a pharmaceutical corporation to donate a tuberculosis drug. They refuse. On the way home, he is stuck in traffic right on the train tracks, as the train is coming. No one in traffic will back up or move forward to allow him off the tracks. At this point I thought “OH, this movie could actually be good, because I think it’s going to be about how no one will make the small gesture to make life nicer for another person, and against that we have this would-be hero who has to find the will within him to save us—and for what?” Unfortunately, none of that really panned out.

Hancock flips Ray’s car over and stops the train, causing a massive derailment. He chides the public slightly for refusing to move, but they lay into him for being, in the film’s repeated word, an “asshole.” This gives Ray an idea, he should put his PR powers to work in rehabilitating Hancock’s image.

He takes Hancock home, where he meets his wife, Mary [Charlize Theron], who seems deeply disturbed by his presence. Ray convinces Hancock [just as easily as that] to enter prison voluntarily to show the public he is accepting punishment, sure that soon crime will rise and the public will ask for Hancock to come back and save them. This, which I don’t think will come as a shock, seeing as it is completely telegraphed in the trailers, is precisely what happens, and thus ends the whole first section of the movie, which in retrospect should have been the entire movie itself. But no, there’s much more in store.

There’s some interludes where Hancock hangs out with Ray’s family, saying that he has no memory of his life before around 1935 [that’s right, he lives forever], but can’t believe that no one would help him or claim him from the hospital when he needed it. I also want to mention one other thing that annoyed me: Hancock is presented as a serious alcoholic, but is able to give up liquor just like *that*. NOOOOO problem. So all you folks suffering away in AA for years--hey, what's your problem?

SPOILERS > > >
So he’s beginning to have a sense that there’s more to Mary than meets the eye, revealed as correct one day [you saw that we’re in the spoiler zone, right?] when she whips him through the front of the house and out into the street. Guess what? She’s a superhero, too! But in hiding and trying to live a normal life. There is a short thing of things getting really hot [that is, physically hot] when the two of them are together. This is summarily dropped. Turns out that the two of them are essentially Greek Gods, and used to be married [this is the only origin story you’ll get]. When they are near to each other, they both lose their powers and become vulnerable—when the script calls for it. The “rules” of this movie are rather impossible to pin down. They fly into downtown L.A., where they have a huge fight in the middle of the city. You might ask yourself “Well, if Mary wants to remain completely anonymous, this is a rather strange way to go about this,” but whatever. You will also notice, in the background, ominous clouds gathering, and then about three huge tornadoes, and soon, a snowstorm in L.A. The scene ends with Ray discovering that Mary has powers as well, and the movie just moves on, leaving you to ask: “Uh, did anyone else notice those tornadoes? Did that seem a little bit unusual?” But no, the movie just moves on as though NOTHING has happened. You know what? I bet what happened is that they were filming The Day After Tomorrow in another part of town during the same time.

The rest of the movie takes a complete departure from the rehabilitation of Hancock and becomes his story with Mary. There’s a long hospital climax, with both Hancock and Mary almost dying because they are vulnerable when close [in some ways, but not others, making the entire thing incomprehensible], and Hancock finally realizing that to save her he needs to get away from her, and moving off to fight crime in New York.
< < < SPOILERS END

I could not understand how it might have ended up this way, until I did a little research and discovered that this movie underwent some major revisions and reshoots. Apparently the original script, which I assume might have stayed with the rehabilitation story, included Hancock drinking with a 12 year old, statutory rape, and him shooting holes in the top of his trailer with his ejaculate. It was submitted twice to the MPAA and received an R rating, and it was vitally important to Columbia that it have a PG-13 rating. Hey, this is Will Smith after all, right? This helps explain all of the touches like the heat and the tornadoes, elements that just go nowhere and have nothing to do with anything. I guess Columbia couldn’t just let all those expensive digital effects go to waste, regardless of whether they made any sense. So what you really have here is two wholly separate movies [in a mere 90 minutes!], thrown haphazardly together, neither of them receiving the time or gravity they deserve. This is the superhero movie that needs to believe in itself!

What’s amazing is that, for as much of a random mess as it is, it is still fairly satisfying. Even though the second part isn’t the movie we came here to see, it’s kind of a kick to have a movie take such a 90-degree turn and follow a path that is truly surprising. And the shift from superheroics and crime-fighting to a romantic personal drama writ large, well—I won’t say it works, but it’s not UNsatisfying. Which, given what is essentially a random assemblage of ideas from two separate stories, is rather remarkable.

Surprisingly, considering that we’re talking about an alcoholic black man who sleeps on park benches BUT, rather than being powerless is quite the opposite, AND what’s more, [SPOILER!] turns out to be married to a white woman [UNSPOILER!], I’m really surprised that this movie doesn’t have more—or ANY—racial resonance. Of course, all of that might have been washed away with the severe stitching together of the two stories, but I somewhat suspect it wasn’t even there in the first place. The movie just doesn’t make anything at ALL of either of these, which may be evidence of a [supposedly] admirable colorblindness, or, as I would lay money on, evidence that the script was written with a white guy in mind and Will Smith was cast at a later time. Interestingly, you can go to Film Freak Central to read Chinese-American Walter Chaw’s review about how this racially provocative film, in conjunction with Obama’s nomination, prove that today’s America is “free(er) at last,” then read African-American Armond White’s review at the New York Press saying that this racially neutered film, in conjunction with Obama’s nomination, prove that black men have to erase their racial characteristics in order to be accepted by mainstream America. Point-counterpoint!

So there ya go. With its provenance and results, somewhat more interesting than your average summer blockbuster! I would love it if the R-rated version came out on DVD in a few months, so we can finally all evaluate what this movie was supposed to be, before Columbia decided that ideas, ANY ideas, we’re a no-no in their summer blockbusters. Until then, Hancock remains just a really weird piece of… something.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

You could do worse, and shapeless as it is, it’s kind of an interesting shapeless.