Hancock - Superbad

Don't read this review if you want to be surprised by this movie.

Hancock has misconceived written all over it.  It seems to have large portions of its content missing, as if the studios cut out an entire reel somewhere to cut its losses - to reach that magic 90 minute mark where four shows a day becomes five. I bet there were a lot of meetings during preproduction (and probably during and after production) to discuss the problems with the script, how there is no villain, how Hancock cannot be too mean and grumpy because he's being played by Will Smith, how the origin of Hancock must be spelled out to the letter to the audience or they just won't accept him.  

If they had these meetings to discuss these problems, they certainly didn't do anything about them.  Maybe they couldn't.  I don't know why movies like Hancock go into production.  If I had read the shooting script, I wouldn't have moved forward with it.  It seems so cheap.  It seems cluttered with unnecessary action sequences.  It arbitrarily installs a villain in its climax.  It's two superhero characters, both good guys, fight each other for no reason.  What, they couldn't sit down and talk?  No, they talk plenty.  They talk way too much.  I'll get into that a bit later.  My guess is Will Smith was locked into a start date, he had picked this for his next picture, and it was getting made no matter what.  That's why they brought Peter Berg in to direct in the last minute to replace the director who had dropped out.  (Did he drop out, maybe, over script concerns?  Over concerns his film would be met with comparisons to My Super Ex-Girlfriend, that tremendous critical and financial flop from 2006?)  But nobody's going to say no to Mr. July.

Hancock concerns the only superhero on earth.  His name is John Hancock, and he is played by Will Smith.  He can fly, and he has super strength, and he cannot be hurt.  He is also an alcoholic with a disdain for public attention, and he has a potty mouth.  Everyone hates Hancock.  The public hates him because he keeps destroying the streets and sidewalks whenever he lands.  They hate him because he sometimes lands on their cars.  They hate him because he destroys buildings and landmarks in his pursuit of criminals.  And the city hates him because all of this costs money.  His latest heroic deed - the apprehension of some Asian gangsters who were shooting up the freeway - adds up to a hefty $9 million in damages, and leaves the gangsters' SUV impaled like a flag on the needle atop the Capitol Records building.  Hancock has hundreds of lawsuits pending against him.  He never shows up in court, and there's nothing anyone can do about it because, what are they going to do, lock him up?

Enter Ray Embrey (played by Jason Bateman).  Embrey is a PR man whose car gets stuck on the train tracks with a four engine cargo train headed right for him.  Hancock intervenes and saves his life, though in the process, he destroys Embrey's car and the train, but at least no one was hurt.  Embrey decides to repay the favor by cleaning up Hancock's image.  He gets Hancock to start saying Thank You, and to tell the police officers already at the crime scenes that they are Doing a Good Job.  ("If they were doing a good job, I wouldn't need to be there," Hancock says.)

All of this stuff is fun.  Bateman is a master at being a smart ass, and Smith plays Hancock as a dense, curmudgeonly, immature slacker with an eternal hangover (He has to drink several fifths of bourbon to even feel anything.).  I thought the movie was headed in a good direction.  It could have been a continuation of a movie like Unbreakable, except if the hero was bored with who he is, and had grown despondent at his inability to be accepted as human.  Unfortunately, the movie has no patience, and the studio has no patience, and we must have our summer blockbuster!  That means there must be fights, there must be epic action sequences, and there must be an explanation.  Let's get to that explanation.

Hancock does not know where he came from.  He tells Embrey that the first thing he can remember is waking up in a hospital in Miami 80 years ago.  He was the same age then as he is now.  The doctors told him he had been wheeled in with a massive head injury, and that the injury healed in a matter of hours.  And ever since, he has had special powers.  He cannot remember his real name or where he came from, and no one ever showed up at the hospital to claim him.

That is all the explanation I need.  It's actually kind of neat and tidy.  It leaves all kinds of questions to the imagination.  You don't know if he came from another planet, you don't know if he used to be human and, in a Phenomenon-sort of way, the head injury gave him his superpowers.  You don't know if, maybe, there is some way to hurt him that he doesn't know about, and that caused his head injury in the first place.  The fact that he doesn't know anything about his past explains why he is so depressed.  The movie should have gone on from there, and just been about his rehabilitation.  Unfortunately, it abandons this concept in favor of explaining over and over again Hancock's real origin story, which grows heedlessly complicated and could probably have been summed up in one sentence if they had focused on it in one of those script meetings instead of glad handing the fact that they were making a summer tent pole movie with the king of summer tent pole movies starring in it.

At about the forty minute mark, Hancock takes a big left turn, and after that it's not fun anymore.  It's at that point that a female superhero with the same powers as Hancock comes into the picture, and she starts talking and talking and talking, and she never shuts up, and when she's not talking, she's throwing Hancock around and dropping semi trucks on his head, and none of it makes any sense.  The more she talked, the more questions I had, and I just wished she would go away, and maybe Hancock could have another bout of amnesia and go back to the Embrey character and start working on his image again.

If, as this female superhero explains, there used to be hundreds of superheros on the planet, and they were all invincible, and they were like Gods or Angels or whatever, then how come nobody wrote about them?  Sure, the Greeks talked about their Gods, but not as living among them.  And if they became human whenever one superhero fell in love with another superhero, and if they aged at that point and died like a normal person, how come none of them ever wrote an Oprah's Book Club bestseller about it?  And this is a biggie - if, as she says, the two of them have been in love on again and off again for over 3000 years, and that no matter where she went, he would come and find her, then how come she feels the need to drop a semi truck on him and kick his ass up and down the block?  Couldn't she just talk it out with him?  Summer tent pole movies are allowed to talk, right?

One question leads to another.  If Hancock has been in Los Angeles for the past ten years, then why would this female superhero even still be living there?  With the kind of danger involved to herself and to him, why wouldn't she take the opportunity to get a job transfer to Hawaii or something?

My guess is they all thought this would be a lot of fun.  Well, it isn't.  It's not fun at all.  It loses its sense of humor as soon as she is introduced, and it goes from bad to worse.  The logical progression of the plot at this point would have been to turn it into a superhero romantic comedy.  Like if Lois Lane had superpowers, too.  They could have done all sorts of stuff with this premise, as late into the movie as it is introduced.  They could have had him chasing her all over the planet asking who they lived with, what they have done.  They could have introduced superhero sex to a mass Hollywood audience.  They could have done it on top of the Eiffel Tower.  They do none of it.  Instead, they pull a villain out of their hat and stick him in one of the lamest climaxes I've seen in a long time.

I should have seen it coming when they mentioned the mortality of the superheros when they are in close proximity to each other.  So Hancock, because he is falling in love, is no longer bulletproof, and gets injured in a stick-up and goes to the hospital.  The female superhero shows up to explain things to him some more (smart move, lady, that's really going to help him heal), and that's when the bad guys burst in with machine guns and start shooting up the place.  The female superhero gets injured, and then while she's flailing on the table and screaming and getting defribulated, and while the fire sprinklers rain down and the florescent lights make everything look all pretty and blue, Hancock stumbles and staggers and beats up the bad guys and throws them out windows, then jumps out a window himself and stumbles and staggers down the street, because he knows the only way to save the female superhero is to get as far away from her as possible.  Then, at the end, he calls her on the phone from the other side of the planet and asks "How's it going?"  Nevermind that she is still with her husband, even though she has deceived him for the past fourteen years and that she is, in fact, a 3000 year old immortal with superpowers.  Nevermind that nobody seems to pay any attention to her, even though she was witnessed, on several occasions, pounding the shit out of Hancock and dropping semi trucks on him.  

Eh, it's a tent pole movie.  It's just trying to have fun.  It's meant to be a good time.  I didn't have a problem with Wanted.  I accepted Indiana Jones for what it was.  I even liked Zohan.  But Hancock sucks.