Hancock... more like Cock-Up, amirite?
Jul. 2nd, 2008 12:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficThere’s one thing Hancock did right: By completely botching the drunkard superhero story, the way is entirely clear for Jon Favreau to blow us away with Iron Man 2: Demon In A Bottle (and apparently it IS going to happen. SQUEE!).
Hancock neatly sidesteps the problem of last week’s Wanted having a morally reprehensible theme by having no theme at all. No message. No subtext. It’s just laughs and action. This wouldn’t be a problem if the laughs were big and the action were exciting. As is, it suffers from the same problem Superman Returns did (in fact, the two movies would make a great double viewing. SR was flawed, true, but everything it got right, Hancock gets wrong. Coming off of a viewing of Will Smith’s antics, you’ll see Brandon Routh’s moping in a whoooole new light): in place of progressively heavier things for Superman to lift, there’s progressively dumber two-bit crooks for Hancock to toss around. Not to spoil things too much, but the prisoner from the trailer who gets his head shoved up another prisoner’s ass? He’s one of the Big Bads. That kinda says it all, doesn’t it?
So the weak comedy of the first half gives way to a second half that’s almost obnoxious in its terribleness. “Nuking the fridge” has some new competition in the lexicon from “throwing the fridge through the front of the house,” which refers to a plot “twist” (think latter-day Shyamalan) which pretty much rapes the plot up to that point. Since this isn’t quite a review, I’ll leave that a surprise, but everything after that strips all the veils off the plot, letting you see its nonsensical gears grind and whine like a steam engine going uphill. The characters are impossible to care about, the love story is odiously chemistry-free, the stakes are nonexistent, and the action sequences are utterly uninvolving. It’s like Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus having a big fight because Spidey cut in front of Doc Ock in the supermarket check-out lane (which wouldn’t surprise me, giving BND!Spidey’s jerkass status).
How to fix things? Io9 has a pretty good article addressing just that, but let’s start from scratch.
In a thrilling opening action sequence, we see a young Hancock trying to rescue a crashing plane. It’s the eighties or so, and he’s dressed in a naïve kid’s idea of a superhero outfit. Think Peter Parker’s first costume in Spider-Man. Though he saves the day, his entrance is met with fear and suspicion. Some people scream that he attacked the plane. Confused and hurt, Hancock takes off. His downward spiral has begun.
Over the next years, it’s a publicity blizzard against Hancock. He keeps superheroing mainly as a big F-U to society, gleefully causing as much trouble as he can (in contrast to the movie Hancock, who seems borderline retarded in his klutziness). He just doesn’t care. Moreover, there’s his arch-nemesis.
It’s astonishing that up until Hancock the movie brings up his secret origin (by… oh bru-ther… AMNESIA), we don’t really care how he came to be. He has superstrength, can fly, and is invulnerable. Do we really need an origin story? Like it or not, we get one, and it’s as nonsensical as midichlorians ever were (it also has one of those infuriating Lost moments where Hancock has access to a character with all the answers to the questions he’s been asking, but instead of playing 20 Questions, he decides to have a completely pointless fight instead. It’s like in the comics when Batman and Superman meet up and have to fight before they team-up, but infinitely stupider since one of the characters is trying to maintain a secret identity… while they rampage through the city. The solution? Put on a pair of sunglasses. Genius.).
Far more interesting is why Hancock does what he does, and why he’s so self-loathing. In the movie, it’s because no one came to claim him after he lost his memory. So he must have been a son of a bitch, yadda yadda. As Io9 points out, this is thin sauce indeed.
So let’s just say that both hero and villain were born with strange powers. It’s ambiguous, but not the frustrating ambiguity of Hancock’s ill-thought-out origin. And this villain is a doozy. A real lucifier. Evil, pure and simple. Let’s call him Joe Simpson.
Ripping a page from James Cameron’s Spider-Man scriptment, Simpson has control over electricity. Which means he can control any machine, any computer, anything over a phone or a TV. But whereas Hancock has used his powers for good, Simpson uses his for personal gain. He’s turned himself into the Kingpin to Hancock’s Daredevil. Once, he tried to recruit Hancock, and when Hancock spurred him Simpson dedicated himself to making Hancock’s life a living hell. Everyone needs a hobby.
So Hancock turns his pariah status into a merit badge. He takes all the nasty headlines and editorials about him and makes them into a scrapbook. And over the years he gets meaner and meaner, drunker and drunker, until he’s virtually a hobo. The world hates and fears him, so to hell with them.
So here’s the theme. Where’s the line between acceptance and conformity? Don’t give in to peer pressure, but take a shower and cut your hair and look presentable. Be yourself, but there’s no I in team. How much do you owe society? Hancock and Simpson are mirror images of each other, Hancock eschewing society and Simpson considering himself above it.
Which brings us to Ray, Jason Bateman’s character. In the movie, he’s a heroic PR agent (really) who tries unsuccessfully to get companies to sign up for his weak charity project. But when it comes to Hancock, all of a sudden he’s a PR guru who gets Hancock the key to the city in half-an-hour. You’d think the meat of the movie would be Ray rehabilitating Hancock (as skeevy as the white guy in a suit telling the scary black man how to behave is), but by the middle of the movie the conflict is resolved and Hancock is beloved by all. This conflict should be strengthened and fleshed out, so that the second hour of the movie doesn’t have to throw the fridge through the front of the house. Call it "My Fair Superhero".
Instead of being cloyingly idealistic, let’s make Ray cutthroat. He spends all day convincing people that his celebrity clients don’t drink and do drugs so that they can… go on drinking and doing drugs. Now there’s some comedy material. Imagine Jason Bateman interacting with the rock star from Meeting Sarah Marshall? Much funnier than the dreary Bateman-pimping-his-charity subplot.
Sure, the pay’s good, but what’s the point? Ray is miserable. He’s completely sold out and given in to society, and it hasn’t made him any happier than outsider Hancock. When Hancock saves him from a train, he sees an opportunity to make the world a better place… at least for one person. He makes his pitch, and Hancock agrees… not because he really wants to change, but because he sees it as a chance to get close to Simpson and take his revenge.
From there, we get the meat of the story. Not just Hancock learning that (gasp!) people don’t like it when he digs ditches in the street with every landing, but showing up on the Today Show, doing interviews, entering rehab, all the things celebs do in real life to clean up their image. That’s primo satire material. It can even climax in the jail sentence. With one major change: Ray pulls some strings and has an old friend, Officer Martinez, assigned to be Hancock’s parole officer. She’s hot, and that much more incentive for Hancock to stay on the straight and narrow.
But in his newfound adoration, Hancock loses sight of his mission. He puts on a superhero suit, cape and all, that looks more like it belongs in a Las Vegas opening act. He’s the toast of the town, but he’s sold out. And here’s where the subtext comes in: Hancock has superpowers and people hate him for it. So he becomes an Uncle Tom. Does he represent America, black America, art? Who knows, but it’s interesting stuff to dig into. Despite his "acceptance", Hancock is still something of a curiosity. He’s not really part of the high-society world that he’s invited to witness.
At one of those soirees, he meets Simpson. He’s expecting the “we aren’t so different, you and I” speech, but instead Simpson talks about Ray and how similar the two of them are. Both manipulators, both nice on the surface, but ruthless underneath. Hancock learns that Martinez is one of Ray’s tricks and that Ray is profiting immensely from Hancock’s rehabilitation (merchandising and whatnot). In fact, Ray’s quit the old PR firm to form his own, with Hancock as his first client.
Depressed, Hancock relapses. He gets stinking drunk and sees a news report about a massacre in South Africa. He goes there and rips the place apart. At first this is audience-pleasing carnage like in Iron Man, but it quickly turns deadly. Hancock doesn’t care who he hurts as he tosses around tanks like they were tinker toys. People are afraid of him. He ditches his friendly, goofy superhero costume for a darker, more militaristic leather outfit (think Morrison’s New X-Men).
Ray is similarly disgraced. He goes back to his old PR firm.
Oh, and there’s been this subplot where Martinez’s cop brother or friend or something has a tip about a big shipment of cocaine (Simpson's) coming into the city. Unfortunately, he’s tortured to death by Simpson’s electrical powers. Martinez tries to tell Hancock about this shipment that the cops are powerless to stop, but he’s hit rock bottom. She goes to investigate herself, but Simpson easily overpowers her and holds her as a hostage for insurance (he saw Hancock take her to the soiree earlier and know they cared about each other).
It’s on a street corner in a bad part of town that he finds a twelve-year-old dying of an overdose. He flies the kid to a hospital, causing lots of property damage in his haste. The kid is wearing a Hancock T-shirt. He pulls through, but barely. And as the TV commentators and radio talk shows harangue him for the destruction he just caused, Hancock realizes he shouldn’t be doing the right thing to be loved or to prove a point. He should be doing the right thing because it’s the right thing.
He flies out to the cocaine shipment to confront Simpson. There’s a huge city-destroying fight with the crowd cheering on Simpson. Ray quits his job and punches out a deadbeat celebrity to support Hancock, who gets the inspiration to press on from the PR man. He saves Martinez, kills Simpson, and the next day his victory is relegated to a tiny corner of the front page (compared to all the attention his wreckage gets).
A month later, Ray’s helping out a charitable foundation and couldn’t be happier. Hancock saves the day in a T-shirt and simple blue jeans. When he flies past, some of the adults cheer and some of them boo. But all the kids cheer. They know a hero when they see one.
Coming soon: I have ideas about how awesome Wanted could've been. Suffice to say that if Hollywood could dust the misogyny off James Bond to make Casino Royale an awesome movie, then surely there's a good movie about vengeful supervillains, the glorification of violent thugs, and hard-earned redemption (no, not Natural Born Killers).
Hancock neatly sidesteps the problem of last week’s Wanted having a morally reprehensible theme by having no theme at all. No message. No subtext. It’s just laughs and action. This wouldn’t be a problem if the laughs were big and the action were exciting. As is, it suffers from the same problem Superman Returns did (in fact, the two movies would make a great double viewing. SR was flawed, true, but everything it got right, Hancock gets wrong. Coming off of a viewing of Will Smith’s antics, you’ll see Brandon Routh’s moping in a whoooole new light): in place of progressively heavier things for Superman to lift, there’s progressively dumber two-bit crooks for Hancock to toss around. Not to spoil things too much, but the prisoner from the trailer who gets his head shoved up another prisoner’s ass? He’s one of the Big Bads. That kinda says it all, doesn’t it?
So the weak comedy of the first half gives way to a second half that’s almost obnoxious in its terribleness. “Nuking the fridge” has some new competition in the lexicon from “throwing the fridge through the front of the house,” which refers to a plot “twist” (think latter-day Shyamalan) which pretty much rapes the plot up to that point. Since this isn’t quite a review, I’ll leave that a surprise, but everything after that strips all the veils off the plot, letting you see its nonsensical gears grind and whine like a steam engine going uphill. The characters are impossible to care about, the love story is odiously chemistry-free, the stakes are nonexistent, and the action sequences are utterly uninvolving. It’s like Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus having a big fight because Spidey cut in front of Doc Ock in the supermarket check-out lane (which wouldn’t surprise me, giving BND!Spidey’s jerkass status).
How to fix things? Io9 has a pretty good article addressing just that, but let’s start from scratch.
In a thrilling opening action sequence, we see a young Hancock trying to rescue a crashing plane. It’s the eighties or so, and he’s dressed in a naïve kid’s idea of a superhero outfit. Think Peter Parker’s first costume in Spider-Man. Though he saves the day, his entrance is met with fear and suspicion. Some people scream that he attacked the plane. Confused and hurt, Hancock takes off. His downward spiral has begun.
Over the next years, it’s a publicity blizzard against Hancock. He keeps superheroing mainly as a big F-U to society, gleefully causing as much trouble as he can (in contrast to the movie Hancock, who seems borderline retarded in his klutziness). He just doesn’t care. Moreover, there’s his arch-nemesis.
It’s astonishing that up until Hancock the movie brings up his secret origin (by… oh bru-ther… AMNESIA), we don’t really care how he came to be. He has superstrength, can fly, and is invulnerable. Do we really need an origin story? Like it or not, we get one, and it’s as nonsensical as midichlorians ever were (it also has one of those infuriating Lost moments where Hancock has access to a character with all the answers to the questions he’s been asking, but instead of playing 20 Questions, he decides to have a completely pointless fight instead. It’s like in the comics when Batman and Superman meet up and have to fight before they team-up, but infinitely stupider since one of the characters is trying to maintain a secret identity… while they rampage through the city. The solution? Put on a pair of sunglasses. Genius.).
Far more interesting is why Hancock does what he does, and why he’s so self-loathing. In the movie, it’s because no one came to claim him after he lost his memory. So he must have been a son of a bitch, yadda yadda. As Io9 points out, this is thin sauce indeed.
So let’s just say that both hero and villain were born with strange powers. It’s ambiguous, but not the frustrating ambiguity of Hancock’s ill-thought-out origin. And this villain is a doozy. A real lucifier. Evil, pure and simple. Let’s call him Joe Simpson.
Ripping a page from James Cameron’s Spider-Man scriptment, Simpson has control over electricity. Which means he can control any machine, any computer, anything over a phone or a TV. But whereas Hancock has used his powers for good, Simpson uses his for personal gain. He’s turned himself into the Kingpin to Hancock’s Daredevil. Once, he tried to recruit Hancock, and when Hancock spurred him Simpson dedicated himself to making Hancock’s life a living hell. Everyone needs a hobby.
So Hancock turns his pariah status into a merit badge. He takes all the nasty headlines and editorials about him and makes them into a scrapbook. And over the years he gets meaner and meaner, drunker and drunker, until he’s virtually a hobo. The world hates and fears him, so to hell with them.
So here’s the theme. Where’s the line between acceptance and conformity? Don’t give in to peer pressure, but take a shower and cut your hair and look presentable. Be yourself, but there’s no I in team. How much do you owe society? Hancock and Simpson are mirror images of each other, Hancock eschewing society and Simpson considering himself above it.
Which brings us to Ray, Jason Bateman’s character. In the movie, he’s a heroic PR agent (really) who tries unsuccessfully to get companies to sign up for his weak charity project. But when it comes to Hancock, all of a sudden he’s a PR guru who gets Hancock the key to the city in half-an-hour. You’d think the meat of the movie would be Ray rehabilitating Hancock (as skeevy as the white guy in a suit telling the scary black man how to behave is), but by the middle of the movie the conflict is resolved and Hancock is beloved by all. This conflict should be strengthened and fleshed out, so that the second hour of the movie doesn’t have to throw the fridge through the front of the house. Call it "My Fair Superhero".
Instead of being cloyingly idealistic, let’s make Ray cutthroat. He spends all day convincing people that his celebrity clients don’t drink and do drugs so that they can… go on drinking and doing drugs. Now there’s some comedy material. Imagine Jason Bateman interacting with the rock star from Meeting Sarah Marshall? Much funnier than the dreary Bateman-pimping-his-charity subplot.
Sure, the pay’s good, but what’s the point? Ray is miserable. He’s completely sold out and given in to society, and it hasn’t made him any happier than outsider Hancock. When Hancock saves him from a train, he sees an opportunity to make the world a better place… at least for one person. He makes his pitch, and Hancock agrees… not because he really wants to change, but because he sees it as a chance to get close to Simpson and take his revenge.
From there, we get the meat of the story. Not just Hancock learning that (gasp!) people don’t like it when he digs ditches in the street with every landing, but showing up on the Today Show, doing interviews, entering rehab, all the things celebs do in real life to clean up their image. That’s primo satire material. It can even climax in the jail sentence. With one major change: Ray pulls some strings and has an old friend, Officer Martinez, assigned to be Hancock’s parole officer. She’s hot, and that much more incentive for Hancock to stay on the straight and narrow.
But in his newfound adoration, Hancock loses sight of his mission. He puts on a superhero suit, cape and all, that looks more like it belongs in a Las Vegas opening act. He’s the toast of the town, but he’s sold out. And here’s where the subtext comes in: Hancock has superpowers and people hate him for it. So he becomes an Uncle Tom. Does he represent America, black America, art? Who knows, but it’s interesting stuff to dig into. Despite his "acceptance", Hancock is still something of a curiosity. He’s not really part of the high-society world that he’s invited to witness.
At one of those soirees, he meets Simpson. He’s expecting the “we aren’t so different, you and I” speech, but instead Simpson talks about Ray and how similar the two of them are. Both manipulators, both nice on the surface, but ruthless underneath. Hancock learns that Martinez is one of Ray’s tricks and that Ray is profiting immensely from Hancock’s rehabilitation (merchandising and whatnot). In fact, Ray’s quit the old PR firm to form his own, with Hancock as his first client.
Depressed, Hancock relapses. He gets stinking drunk and sees a news report about a massacre in South Africa. He goes there and rips the place apart. At first this is audience-pleasing carnage like in Iron Man, but it quickly turns deadly. Hancock doesn’t care who he hurts as he tosses around tanks like they were tinker toys. People are afraid of him. He ditches his friendly, goofy superhero costume for a darker, more militaristic leather outfit (think Morrison’s New X-Men).
Ray is similarly disgraced. He goes back to his old PR firm.
Oh, and there’s been this subplot where Martinez’s cop brother or friend or something has a tip about a big shipment of cocaine (Simpson's) coming into the city. Unfortunately, he’s tortured to death by Simpson’s electrical powers. Martinez tries to tell Hancock about this shipment that the cops are powerless to stop, but he’s hit rock bottom. She goes to investigate herself, but Simpson easily overpowers her and holds her as a hostage for insurance (he saw Hancock take her to the soiree earlier and know they cared about each other).
It’s on a street corner in a bad part of town that he finds a twelve-year-old dying of an overdose. He flies the kid to a hospital, causing lots of property damage in his haste. The kid is wearing a Hancock T-shirt. He pulls through, but barely. And as the TV commentators and radio talk shows harangue him for the destruction he just caused, Hancock realizes he shouldn’t be doing the right thing to be loved or to prove a point. He should be doing the right thing because it’s the right thing.
He flies out to the cocaine shipment to confront Simpson. There’s a huge city-destroying fight with the crowd cheering on Simpson. Ray quits his job and punches out a deadbeat celebrity to support Hancock, who gets the inspiration to press on from the PR man. He saves Martinez, kills Simpson, and the next day his victory is relegated to a tiny corner of the front page (compared to all the attention his wreckage gets).
A month later, Ray’s helping out a charitable foundation and couldn’t be happier. Hancock saves the day in a T-shirt and simple blue jeans. When he flies past, some of the adults cheer and some of them boo. But all the kids cheer. They know a hero when they see one.
Coming soon: I have ideas about how awesome Wanted could've been. Suffice to say that if Hollywood could dust the misogyny off James Bond to make Casino Royale an awesome movie, then surely there's a good movie about vengeful supervillains, the glorification of violent thugs, and hard-earned redemption (no, not Natural Born Killers).
