MOVIE Review
Will Smith sheds his Mr Nice Guy image to play an anti-superhero with mixed results
KONG RITHDEE
Homeless, drunk and obnoxious: Hancock is not your average friendly neighbourhood superhero. |
Hancock, Starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, Directed by Peter Berg.: Early on in Hancock, it looks as if someone has finally deconstructed the superhero mythology, bound tightly by the Marvel Comics tradition, and subverted the playbook with proud, jolly blasphemy. Hancock, played by Will Smith, is an alcoholic superhuman with bad breath and a worse temper. He slouches on a sidewalk bench in downtown LA, soaked in booze, when a high-speed crime takes place on the freeway and this drunken hobo is roused into action.
It turns out that Hancock can fly, not with the sombre elegance of Superman, but in the treacherous manner of a drunken pilot, a Jim Beam in hand. In other words, as he feels obligated to use his power to help the police, his identity trauma has driven him into the despair of hard-living - I wouldn't be surprised if he's also a heroine junkie, a frequenter of brothels, a determined suicide (which is tough since he cannot be killed). Most superheroes are misfits. Hancock is supposed to suffer from worse: this guy is a fallible god, an anti-superhero.
His method of dealing with the baddies is crude, gangster-like and spectacularly uncivil. He talks trash, insults policemen and onlookers, harasses children, and threatens to shove one bad guy's head into another guy's ass. In his superheroic missions he destroys public property, injures people and adds to the work of the police instead of easing it. Spider-man and Batman are misunderstood; Hancock, meanwhile, is hated with a passion by the citizens of LA. "Why don't you just go to New York," one demands to know. In Hancock, superheroism is not an astonishing anti-crime stunt. Its a cinch, a reality of a functional First-World society. Only that Hancock's destructive, bad-boy tendency is turning it into a civil dysfunction.
In our adult lives, we have been exposed to so many well-meaning superheroes, and thus the ill-bred, cheeky Hancock is quite refreshing, but only for about 30 minutes. The film's subversive comedy slowly loses its conviction and the nonconformist hero feels compelled to indulge himself in the favourite American hobby of self-improvement. Hancock is unique because he doesn't play by the rules, and it's less fascinating when he enters the standardisation process. Whats so fun about reformed rock stars, or rehabbed genius junkies? Hancock's transformation is urged upon him by Ray Embley (Jason Bateman), a PR man who sets out to improve the public image of the superhero after Hancock saves his life. The centrepiece of Ray's plan is for Hancock to turn himself in for the charges of drunk-flying and damaging government property. The flying black man is not convinced, but he lets himself be escorted to jail, with the hope that when criminals run rampant, people will begin to miss him.
Hancock is directed by Peter Berg, who made the frenzied, Riyadh-set The Kingdom last year, from the script by Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan. When its clever premise withers - and even the ever-appealing Mr Smith cannot save it - the movie suffers from confusing shifts of tone. This is a parody of superhero films, but it is also a superhero film, furnished with all the requisite setpieces that tear through the street of LA like a crazy tornado. It also wants to be a comedy, then it aspires to become a no-nonsense drama about the existential angst of the superspecies: Where did Hancock come from; What is his background? Then the movie enters its awkward second half when it morphs into a lumbering meditation on fate and love, aided by the glowing presence of Charlize Theron as Mary, Ray's wife who feels drawn towards Hancock.
That's supposed to be subversive too: the miscegenation of a black superman and a white woman, only that by this point we've stopped caring. Hancock wants to shed the baggage that usually comes with the superhero genre and start anew, but in the process it conjures up its own baggage - heavier, clumsier and much less heartbreaking than Superman and his orphan complex or Spider-man and his troubled adolescence. When the media condemns Hancock and his wild stunts, it feels like a tabloid disparagement of a badly behaved celebrity. But when gossip columnists bash unruly stars, the purpose is not to correct their ways: the bashing is the purpose. Its just not fun to have nice, well-behaved celebrities, and its even less exciting to have nice, respectful, and law-abiding superhumans.
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