Hancock

[B4UTRUST]

Alright, aside from the movie sounding like a cheesy plot for the porn industry to make a spoof, the movie's title makes sense when explained in film.

Though, sadly, it's about the only thing that really makes sense. The movie is hyped as a superhero movie about a would-be hero who just can't get it right. Hey, sounds like a good flick to me. And for the most part it did follow that line until about the last 3rd of the movie where you get the "big twist."

Hancock is supposedly (from the trailers even) the "only one of his kind" and in some trailers we see him fighting someone else and getting knocked around. Of course enter the 'super-villian.' This is the 'twist' that turns the entire movie upside down and pretty much fucks it all up. The twist was unneccessary, pointless and horribly done and took a fairly good movie and made it into something about as profound and meaningful as an assassin taking out Captain America with a sniper rifle while his backs turned.

The constant eye contact between Smith and one of the other actors pretty much gives away the twist almost immediately, while Jason Bateman's character gets about as much screentime as Smith does, while adding absolutely nothing to a nothing character. The only character in the entire movie that has any depth what so ever was Hancock and I think Smith did an excellent job with it. However one good character in a movie full of one dimensionals does not a good movie make.

[spoilers]Alright, Hancock and his buddy's wife are now the only two of these 'agents of the gods' left? We go from a superhero with amnesia who woke up with his powers (hey, it's about as likely as Ben Grim turning into a shit-ugly walking brick because of 'cosmic rays' or Peter Parker becoming Spidey by being bit by a spider) to an immortal 'enforcer of the gods' wills.' This was complete bullshit. I was enjoying the movie up until this point. Here we have Hancock, an alcoholic, antisocial superhero who while well-meaning is about as careful with keeping collateral damage to a minimum as Oprah is at an all-you-can-eat buffet. And now he's an agent of some god or other who's lived for a few thousand years, is one of two left that can't even get together to spawn new little super-powered fucktrophies because as soon as they get close to each other they start becoming mortal and plain-jane normal again. WTF. There's not even a real villain in the movie. It's a few random faceless fuck-off thugs who get their ass handed to them by Hancock followed by one of them, an apparent PhD of pyschology or some shit, organizing a group of them to escape from Prison to suddenly kill Hancock and Mary because the 'mastermind' in charge is some guy or from some organization of guys that's been trying to kill them for awhile? It makes no fucking sense what so ever.

What's worse is that unless they do a director's cut with some 30 odd minutes of extra footage it'll never make much sense since they edited about that much out of it just to get the PG-13 rating. This entire movie just has the feel of being over-edited and it really is. A lot of footage was removed for pacing and for rating and it left something important out I think because otherwise that means it's just a 2 hour movie of nonsensical crap instead of an hour and 32 minutes of it. I was hoping for a lot better with this movie, I really was. Oh well.[/spoilers]

This movie really wasn't that impressive to me overall and it felt over-edited. Save your money for the rental or for a better superhero flick coming out (The Dark Knight). Other then that, if you really want to go see it, stay a few minutes into the credits for an extra scene which sadly is probably the funniest of the entire film.

[The Silence and I]

And now for something completely different!

See it. You'll love it. I did.

I thought it had a good pacing with plenty of action to break up the slower moments and only suffered a little from the camera shake thing. Smith delivers an awesome character with some actual depth and plenty of humor to go around. Anyone paying attention will see the twist coming but that wasn't a letdown for me--it just made it less of a twist and more of a mystery I wanted to see the end of. I thought they solved the 'how do you make an invulnerable character someone the audience can relate with' problem in a novel and refreshing manner, they don't try to explain Hancock's powers (well, there are some throw-away tidbits that amount to "we actually haven't been told anything about it") and the final, climactic fight had me genuinely feeling for Hancock and rooting for him.

Finally, there was a twist at the end but not the one most people are thinking of :)

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Were there problems with it? Sure, not all of B4's complaints fall on my deaf ear, for example there is a feeling that the movie would really benefit from some of what they cut out. There are parts of the film where the transition from point A to point B is mostly off screen and I hope the DVD has some of that filled in. But for the most part I can only recommend ignoring his review and watching this movie.