I Want My Hour Thirty Two Back

Hey everyone. Been a while. Sorry about that.

But I'm back, and I'm pissed as hell. Why, you may ask? The answer-Hancock. You know, that movie that came out a little while back? Last summer, if I'm not mistaken? Now, I feel I'm obligated to tell you that there will be spoilers in this post, just in case you haven't seen the film. But to be honest, that shouldn't stop you from reading this, because by no means should you ever waste precious minutes of your life suffering through the piece of cinematic tragedy that is Hancock. So just keep reading. And for crying out loud, spend some time with your family instead of watching this befuddled crap.

While I had heard the movie wasn't very good, I was intrigued by the story idea (drunken super hero tries to turn his image around and become a better person) and decided it was probably worth a rental. After all, Onion A/V gave it a B+, and I usually find their reviews to be pretty spot on.

The movie starts out well enough. You meet Hancock, super hero down on his luck who ejaculates semen bullets (thank god that was in the film), and Jason Bateman (along with his wife, played by Charlize Theron, and kid), the also down on his luck PR agent trying to help Hancock turn it around. And thus, the healing begins. This is the interesting, intriguing even, part of the film. Hancock makes public apology. Hancock goes to jail to do his time. Hancock shoves man's head up another man's ass to "Sanford and Son" theme (that was actually pretty funny). The biggest issue so far is the pacing. I remember thinking, "This is going so fast, I'm not getting any time to actually care about any of the characters." But that turned out to be a minute detail in comparison to what failures were yet to come.

In what feels like about fifteen minutes real time, Hancock is released from prison when the chief of police needs his help. In another pretty cool action sequence, he busts up a bank robbery and hostage situation. This scene is used to create the film's villain, if you want to call him that, Red Parker. Hancock has turned it around, he's flying high, great, good stuff.

Okay. Here's where this film goes completely off the deep end. I'll just get this overwith quickly. Turns out Bateman's character's wife (remember her? I referenced her in parenthesis earlier, no way I'm glorifying her character with name) actually has super powers too, because she and Hancock, as it turns out, are two superhumans, the last of their kind, charged with the task of protecting humanity, and they used to be married, but now they're not, because they had a bad relationship, and they've both been alive since the beginning of time, and their drawn to each other, so even though she tries, she can't get away from Hancock, and she's even more powerful than he is, and they have a big fight involving weather, and then Jason Bateman finds out his wife has powers, and it turns out that when Hancock and that woman are close to each other, they start to lose their powers (a fact she decided to keep to herself til Hancock accidentally got shot), but wait, they didn't lose their powers at all when they had their big torando fight, forget it, we'll write in a line later to fix it (oops, we didn't), and now Hancock is at the hospital, and so is she, and it's bad guy from the bank robery (who could forget him, he was so important to the plot and has such a deep character), and he's put together a gang featuring himself and the two guys in the head ass incident, and Hancock has to fight him with like no powers, and gets shot like 80 times and is fine, and then just leaves because if he leaves he'll get his powers back and he does and everyone's fine and he and that woman have some ET connection or something so she's fine too and we're all fine and he goes to New York so bye.

That's literally the plot. A great idea, and not only that, a great performance by Will Smith (I don't know how he sells this stuff, but somehow he's good enough to make you almost, just almost buy into this crap), completely turned to crap. And that's why I hated this movie. Full on hated. Because it wasted a good premise, and destroyed a potential great film in the hopes of making money at the box office. The writers of this film should be utterly ashamed of themselves. They pimped everyone involved with their terrible, unfocused screenplay. Not to mention the film is filled with on the nose, trite dialogue, and almost no character development on anyone's part. It's really hard to care about any of the characters other than Will Smith. Honestly, I've read better undergraduate student work.


"Why on earth did we make this film?"
"I wish I knew!"

This Hollywood junk makes me reconsider going into movies at all. The fact that people were payed, rewarded, for writing this half baked crap makes me wonder why exactly I'm not raking in money right now myself. Maybe I'll write a sequel. I'll call it, "Hancock-Crapped Out." Come to think of it, that'd be a pretty good name for the first one.

--Daniel