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Beating Logic in 'Hancock'

By Daniel Montgomery

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

‘Hancock’ can be summed up in three words: error in judgment. There are some movies that are born bad; from the drawing board, the pitch meeting, the first word on the first page of the first draft of the screenplay, they seem never even to have been intended to be good. ‘Hancock’, however, starts well and then goes bad for no good reason. The co-writers are Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan. The latter is a seasoned television producer and writer whose resume includes ‘The X-Files’ — he should have known better.

So what happened? I can’t explain in detail. It involves a whopper of a twist that the studio’s publicity department has done a good job keeping secret, and far be it from me to spill the beans in a movie industry saturated with spoilers, bloggers, clips, and trailers that give everything away (though recent ads have begun to tease the big reveal, perhaps to prepare the audience for the unwelcome surprise). Suffice it to say that somewhere at midpoint a brand new screenplay seems to take over, and it’s not a good one. It overturns characters like a bull in a china shop, undergoes an awkward and abrupt change in tone, and floods us with a lot of senseless gobbledegook about the details of the main character’s existence. I took two-and-a-half pages of notes after the film, and more than half of those were spent describing plot holes, which become deeper and more numerous the more the script tries to explain itself.

What is baffling is why the screenplay undergoes its drastic course correction at all. ‘Hancock’ is founded on a strong premise, one that doesn’t need padding and which on its own could fill a perfectly satisfying feature-length film: Hancock (Will Smith) is an amnesiac superhero. He doesn’t know who he is or where he came from, but he has superpowers — flying, super strength, invulnerability — and uses them frequently, recklessly. Though he fights crime and saves the day, the populace hates him. Upon rescuing a man from an oncoming train, the onlookers don’t thank him, but rather complain about the massive property damage he caused in the process.

What a great idea! Since the original ‘Spider-Man’ broke box office records in 2002, the summer movie season has been dominated by comic book crusaders. Here instead is a superhero born in the modern age, where YouTube, cell phone cameras, and the 24-hour cable news cycle have created a savvy, jaded public. A man who can fly? Big deal! Who’s going to fix that pothole? Hancock has roughly the same abilities as Superman, but he reflects a different zeitgeist. It is said that a society can be judged by how it treats its poor; might it also be said that a society reveals just as much about itself by the way it treats its most super?

Appropriately, the man he saves from that oncoming train works in public relations. An image consultant — is there a job title more indicative of the times? His name is Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), and out of gratitude he sets out to make Hancock more appealing to the public by training him in those areas that will make his heroism more welcome: practiced humility, adherence to societal laws, respect for public property, and last but not least the wearing of an appropriately goofy skin-tight costume. The first step is for Hancock to submit to imprisonment for his criminally reckless behavior. A great scene shows him accidentally throwing a basketball beyond the prison fence; he flies out of the prison to retrieve it, and then flies back in.

But then it goes wrong, wrong, wrong. You want to shake it back to its senses, pull it back from the brink, yank its leash like a dog gone mad chasing a stray cat. Some films ask that you check your brain at the door. This one requires it, because if you have cells insistently firing away, they’re going to pick up that it’s a crock, that none of it makes a lick of sense, that the rug has been pulled out from under you and all you want is the rug back. The twist swallows the movie whole, so that even Hancock’s arch nemesis, Red (Eddie Marsan), is given short shrift — hardly any shrift at all, he’s shrift-less. Red is supposedly a criminal genius, a psychology professor skilled at manipulation, yet his ingenious plans seem to come down to a lot of mindless gunplay and the strapping of bombs to people; somewhere, Lex Luthor is yawning.

There was another movie like this: M. Night Shyamalan’s underrated ‘Unbreakable’. That film took a darker approach — a headier brand of thriller, as opposed to this film’s popcorn-populism — but also considered a modern superhero in a very un-comic-book milieu. I thought about it during this film because of the things they have in common. Success is not one of them.

Visit The ‘Hancock’ Official Website