Spoiled Reviews

Cecilia: Now that’s the movie M. Night Shyamalan should have made.

Brian: Just to consolidate all the Philadelphia pride?

Cecilia: Because there was an actual twist in this one.

Brian: Which was really quite surprising, if you don’t watch too many of the commercials.

Cecilia: I saw something coming, just not that, exactly. Mostly I was impressed with the trailer for not giving away the entire film. What a novelty! In fact, it played off of our preconceptions (see the trailer, have seen the film) and tricked us into thinking we knew the whole deal.

Brian: Yeah, I thought I knew the whole story going in. Fortunately I was wrong.

Cecilia: Ditto for me. It was almost a different movie, in fact. The trailer bills it as a big blockbuster, but it had a lot of comedic elements.

Brian: I thought it worked pretty well as a comedy, maybe even better than it did as an action movie, if only because (and this is nitpicky) did you notice that the whole movie was shot very close to the actors faces?

Cecilia: I found myself wondering how many times the scriptwriter had to type C.U.

Brian: It wasn’t annoying, just distracting at times. I guess they wanted their stars bigger than life on the screen at all times. Just a strange visual element.

But back to the parts of the movie people will actually care about; the story of the disillusioned/incompetent superhero is past due for a movie. It’s something which comic book readers are familiar with but it remains interesting, even when done in an offhand, halfassed way.

Cecilia: We’re all so tired of the perfect superhero, and we love poking holes in our idols.

Brian: Please don’t say things like that, it sounds like dime store sociology. And I demand at least 25 cents for my sociology, what with inflation and all.

Cecilia: Ok, will you settle for a dollar bill with holes in it?

Brian: How many holes?

Cecilia: About 75 cents worth.

Brian: Sold.

Cecilia: They certainly paid the actors more than that.

Brian: But I really think the movie succeeds on the shoulders of the three leads. Will Smith and Jason Bateman deliver as expected, but with Charlize Theron we get an actress who is ridiculously beautiful yet can still bring genuine emotion to the role. This isn’t Jessica Alba painfully going through acting class basics.

Cecilia: “All right, this is anger. Now furrow your brow… Okay, honey, now you just look constipated, let’s try again.”

Brian: Exactly.

Cecilia: It’s great to see a good actress playing what isn’t just your typical foil. Especially since she’s so important to the plot. When she shows up on screen, the tension between her character and Smith’s is almost over-done, or at least it appeared so at first. I figured the usual: they used to date, or she accidentally spilled the nuclear waste on him, something prosaic. Her secret is actually much better.

Brian: Well, the movie starts off giving us little more than a vague setup. Here’s for our readers who haven’t yet seen it: Will Smith is Hancock, a guy with Superman-like powers (flight, strength, invulnerability) but no clear history. He’s a mystery man with magnificent power and below average hygiene, who has a compulsion to help solve Los Angeles’ problems, even though he doesn’t care to do it sober. He rescues floundering (but good-hearted) PR man Ray (Jason Bateman) from imminent death by train, of course destroying his car and derailing the locomotive in the process. Ray brings him back home in an attempt to sell his services to the misguided Hancock.

Cecilia: The two stick together; Ray needs a resume builder and Hancock needs a better image–I guess the NBA wasn’t returning his calls.

Brian: Hancock stays around for the wonderfully subarban family’s spaghetti madness night. His interactions with Ray’s son are hilarious. The kid blindly idolizes him as a superhero while Hancock gives him boozy, inapropriate advice. Will Smith really shines here; he may not curse in his rap, but he drops some bombs here with good effect. Charlize Theron, as Bateman’s wife Mary, doesn’t respond to their visitor in such a friendly manner.

Cecilia: From the outset she seems wary of having Hancock in their house, but at first it’s not clear why.

Brian: Yeah, we wonder whether she knows this guy, or if she just wants to avoid costly property damage by keeping superheros out of the dining room.

Cecilia: While we’re trying to decide what that something is with Mary, the movie artfully gives nothing away about how much Hancock knows or doesn’t know. Mary seems to know him and, while he’s drawn to her, we’re not sure whether he remembers her or not.

Brian: After Ray convinces Hancock that a stint in prison would be good for his image, he spends his time in the clink alternately inserting inmates’ heads into other inmates’ anuses, and facing his demons. His alcoholism seems to stem from his lonliness, his inability to truly connect with the regular humans whom he attempts to help.

Cecilia: It also seems to disappear in a flash. Oh, to go through withdrawal as a superhero. The best part was (and here’s for the folks who have seen the film) Mary’s big revelation: she’s not your average housewife: immortal and seemingly all-powerful, with abilities akin to Hancock’s, she’s a bit of a surprise to Ray. I have to say I liked this turn, even if it did come at an odd moment in the structure of the film.

Brian: Yeah but casting her as Hancock’s cosmically aranged pari as part of a race of immortals was inspired. The theme is similar to that in the Highlander series, but with a twist. Who wants to live forever, and would you give up the chance at love for power? The immortals in Hancock get a chance at love, but that option comes entangled with death. If these two remain together too long, they slowly become mortals, complete with all the trappings of vulnerability and eventual death. I suppose it’s fitting of the film’s positive outlook that all of the other immortals have chosen love and death over lonliness and eternal life. Hancock and Mary are the only two left.

Cecilia: The final showdown makes a good catalyst for this decision. A one-handed man Hancock put in prison returns to take his revenge. Mary is shot in all the hullabaloo and Hancock has to make the ultimate choice: he can stay and lose both Mary and his powers, or leave and let everything remain intact. He leaves.

The movie withheld a lot of crucial information until that final scene, and at times the exposition came a little too little, a little too late.

At first the ambiguity left me with a pleasantly unsteady feeling, which then morphed into frustration. We’re clamoring to understand this guy, but they don’t give us any solid footholds until the third act.

Brian: Fair enough, but it doesn’t say much since the third act started about 45 damn minutes into the movie.

Cecilia: Yeah, the structure really was a little wonky. It felt like it was either a master playing a little too freely with the boundaries, or a beginner who didn’t quite yet know the ropes.

Brian: Well I wouldn’t call Peter Berg a master.

Cecilia: Neither would I.

Brian: He directed Very Bad Things.

Cecilia: Both a title for one of his movies and a descriptor for some of his others.

Brian: He does a good enough job with all the wanton destruction Hancock wreaks as he “saves” the city, although I would have liked to see a little more done with the people of the city attempting to stop him, or at least to repair some of the damage. Ultimately I wish they spent more time developing Hancock’s public persona, and then go after the personal stuff.

Granted they could have done it before or during his time in jail.

Cecilia: Agreed, but I appreciated what they did with the personal. The whole film was fairly light-hearted for the kind of movie it was. The body count didn’t stack too high and the jokes were innocuous enough that nothing really seemed overly dire. It was something pleasantly irreverent, not mean-spirited the way, say, The Incredible Hulk was.

Brian: Although Hancock has an edge, albeit a soft one. I can’t remember the last time I heard a movie pay so much attention to the word asshole. But the Hancock character keeps things within the bounds of basic heroic morality.

Cecilia: And no one gets unduly pounded to a pulp.

Brian: He has good intentions, which is pointed at interestingly towards the end of the film by Theron’s character. She reveals that he’s drawn to do good, built for the benefit of mankind, which explains why she avoids him and helps get around the age-old problem most superhero franchises have: why the hell doesn’t this guy quit helping the ungrateful public and just declare himself the king of Spain.

Cecilia: I liked that monologue. She details the many times the two were together, as mortals, and were assaulted by angry mobs. It was clear they were being attacked for being different, but the differences weren’t concretely laid out. Was it because they were immortal? or was it because they were an interracial couple?

Brian: Non-specificity worked there. The attack in early 20th century Florida that caused his amnesia was, I’m guessing, race related, but they never say it.

Cecilia: Right, it let you think what you wanted to, which is rare in a superhero movie, or any big movie these days. Usually they take your conceptions and set them on a rigid line, with no deviation allowed. But here there was some, albeit tiny, wiggle room for thought.

Brian: This is definitely more fluid. I feel like the speed helped. By keeping the movie at a brisk pace, they never have a chance to overdevelop any fairly obvious ideas. You have to use your brain a little bit to make some connections but it’s not exactly heavy lifting.
At the same time, certain elements suffer from underdevelopment. The criminal who comes after him at the climax, there wasn’t much there. As is, he was just a dastardly guy with one hand who wanted petty revenge on a superhero. It was a too much/not enough situation. The film spent too much time with that character to say so little about him.

Cecilia: Good point. He was something of a throw-away that got about eight too many close-ups.

Brian: He had no idea that Hancock would no longer be invulnerable when he broke out.

Cecilia: Nor did he have any contingency plan, as the best super-villains must. He just lucked out, even though he did get thrown from a fiftieth story window. At least his head didn’t go up anyone’s ass.

Brian: That whole sequence felt prodigiously edited.

Cecilia: Probably because it was, and a bit clumsily, at that. But it was still evocative in the way it wanted to be, and while the editing seemed slapped together (the third zoom-in to the flat-lining heart monitor? we get it, already) the images themselves worked on a basic level.

Brian: And that reminds me of what really sold me on the movie. This is the first film I can remember in quite some time which used the defibulator paddles correctly in the hospital scene. Most movies have them trying to jump start a flat line when the paddles are actually used to fix irregular heart beats, not no heartbeat. Hancock delivers on the little things, even when you suspect they won’t. It’s a very successful, if very simple, movie.

Cecilia: But you can bet we’ll be getting a sequel, though where they’re going to go with it now that the title character’s a reformed man, I’m not sure. Maybe Hancock is just bored. Hey, after thousands of years it can get depressing being an immortal superbeing.

-Cecilia Razak and Brian Stitt