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Hancock Movie Review (2008) |
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Posted on
4:00 p.m. PST July 11, 2008 |
By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff
07/01/2008
In superhero comedy 'Hancock,' weaknesses outweigh
strengths
Look up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Oh, for
Pete's sake, it's Hancock. And he's drunk. Again.
Yes, Los Angeles's unreliable superhero is
passed out on a city bench one minute and zooming
intoxicated over the freeway to stop Uzi-toting gang-bangers
the next. Before he almost kills them, he makes a blithe
racist remark. It's like "Lethal Weapon" all over again,
with one man doing the job of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.
The idea of a sloshed, misanthropic superhero is a good one.
The idea of putting him in a comedy is even better. Having
Will Smith play the hero? Genius. And maybe some future
global blockbuster will find a way to bundle it all into a
thrilling work of entertainment.
In the meantime, there's "Hancock." What does one say about
a movie that wants laughs from a shot of one inmate's head
up the derriere of another? Well, there's "ouch." But
there's also "why?"
"Hancock," which has a batch of sneak previews tonight
before opening everywhere tomorrow, proudly bills its main
character as "not your average superhero." By "average" the
filmmakers presumably mean he is not made of iron or teeming
with gamma rays. In other words, he's not from the universe
of Marvel Comics. If only.
M. Night Shyamalan's "Un breakable" managed to create an
original superhero out of Bruce Willis, with painstaking
wonder. Wonder is what's missing here. "Hancock" staggers to
the screen from a lousy script that seems written by focus
group rather than by Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan, the
credited typists.
With his stubbled, wool-hat-and-shorts look, Hancock appears
virtually homeless. His reputation is in the toilet, so cue
the down-on-his-luck PR agent (a characteristically droll
Jason Bateman) to cajole Hancock into an image rehab. Soon
Hancock is voluntarily off to jail (for some stupid,
sub-"Oz" business). Then, he's released when the LAPD calls.
Smith puts on a tight black costume, goes lawfully stiff,
and gives us an amusing flash of how Richard Pryor might
have played RoboCop.
The movie quickly runs aground when it has to explain
itself. A back story is invented that I'm not convinced the
filmmakers entirely understand. It's easier and more fun to
show Hancock launching an obnoxious 12-year-old bully into
the clouds or whipping a whale into the ocean than to
disclose where the power to do so has come from.
There's the additional headache of what Charlize Theron is
doing here. She doesn't figure into much of the film's
advertising, but she plays Bateman's wife and, for half her
scenes, she's reduced to badly darting her eyes whenever
Hancock is around. If this were a murder-mystery board game,
I'd accuse Ms. Theron in the ballroom with the Oscar.
Once she arrives, all the obscene snap goes out of Smith,
and everyone's behavior makes even less sense. As a courtesy
I won't be terribly specific, but the movie suggests a
rather incredible racial odyssey. It culminates with an
intriguing Hollywood metaphor for Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton's endless tussle for the Democratic nomination.
The makers of "Hancock" had an opportunity to write a cool
ticket (movie, not presidential). But the film has a
depressing lack of imagination. And having Smith play a
superhero seems redundant, since for years his superpower
involved making Hollywood lots of money on the Fourth of
July.
"Hancock" probably won't disrupt the trend. Yet once the
vulgar comedy dissipates, we're left with poorly
photographed, bullet-riddled summer-action mayhem. The only
thing drunker than Hancock is the editing and camerawork.
Director Peter Berg ("Friday Night Lights," "The Kingdom")
has a knack for movies with a bulldozing style. But he
usually finds a way to balance the noise with either gags or
solemnity. This time his filmmaking is as woozy and
gratuitously belligerent as his hero.
Berg, a former actor, also leaves his stars in the lurch.
Smith and Theron wear an expression I've never seen on them
before. It's called, "What's my motivation?" And obligated
to feel something trudging out of the theater, I was left in
the lurch, too. What's mine?
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