HANCOCK : My Review & THINGS I'VE HEARD

My Wife's Quote of the Week

"I can't tell you how many ways Comcast can go f**k themselves in their own ass!"

Amen baby, amen...

Hancock: My A.D.D. Review
(A film directed by Peter Berg and written by Vince Gilligan & Vincent Ngo. Stars Will Smith, Charlize Theron & Jason Bateman.)

Many critics have bashed this film and I can certainly understand why. I'm here to tell you that I liked HANCOCK, despite it's very obvious script flaws. I think the screenwriters decided to sneak in some plot material that would have more emotional resonance and more of an epic scale and it pulls the tablecloth out from under the movie for a lot of people. After all, for the first 55 minutes or so we've seen John Hancock (Will Smith) flying around Los Angeles in a state of permanent surly inebriation saving people just as much as he's pissing them off and the whole thing is a sort of darkly comic blast, a total inversion of the usual superhero movie. It's fun to consider what it would be like if a superhero didn't want to be a superhero and didn't particularly enjoy it. It's just as much fun to watch him save idealistic PR man (the movie's greatest stretch) Ray Embrey (charmingly played by Jason Bateman) and then have Embrey make it his personal mission to try and singlehandedly remake Hancock's image.

Theron plays Embrey's wife and from the second Hancock meets her we know something is amiss and once the mystery between them is revealed we have our controversial plot twist and we're off to the races. Since the marketing machine has worked very hard and very effectively to conceal the big twist, I won't reveal it here, but I will say that it didn't bother me that much. I liked the new information the story revealed and I liked the subtext of tragedy that the twist introduced. Just because the commercials pitch HANCOCK one way, it doesn't mean that it has to hew strictly to that one note--although we are all tired of movie marketing tricks and I get that. My main complaint is that I would have liked the twist to be revealed a little bit sooner, because now a lot of information gets piled into the end of the movie (which is already a very abbreviated 100 or so minutes) and there's not a lot of time to process everything that's going on.

In short, HANCOCK is a fun ride with more intelligence and heart than advertised but not quite enough coherence. The effects are good--all the better because they look totally realistic in modern L.A. Will Smith is totally believable playing against his usual wisecracking type and Bateman and Theron hit their marks as well. The movie could have used more menacing villains but if there's a sequel ("if", ha ha ha ha ha, I kill me!) that will probably be addressed. It won't make you forget IRON MAN (or the upcoming DARK KNIGHT), but HANCOCK is a worthwhile couple of hours in the theater. Besides, if the pool is busy how else are you going to beat the heat this summer if not by going to the movies?

My Grade: B-

Finally, it's good to be back from vacation. Everyone should spend some time in the Colorado Rockies in their lives, the further from the big cities the better.

Peace...