July 11, 2008
In Bangkok, we get the kind of movies that Ignatius Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” used to relish going to see – the kind that were so terrible they would provide him with ample material, for the mocking running commentaries (”A negation of all human qualities”) he enjoyed loudly voicing while watching them in public.
It’s an oft-heard refrain here – particularly oft-heard if you’re in conversation with this writer after his editor kindly reminds him deadline IS TOMORROW – that 90 percent of the Hollywood films that are released in Bangkok are pure crapole, but the truth of that statement doesn’t lessen with repetition. And here I’m not talking about the output from that Thai comedy troupe who turns every third film made in this country into a mess of whoopee-cushion-like sound effects and different takes on the “why transvestites are hilarious” theme, but rather the stuff that’s put out so studios can make back the millions they spent financing a movie that will be remarkable in 25 years only for how infrequently it is the subject of any remarks (and they also need to distribute internationally so stars like Will Smith can flirt with cute reporters while on international promotional tours).
That Hollywood blockbusters need to recoup the third-world debt-like sums that it costs to make them explains why when looking at what movie to check out at my local theater in eastern Bangkok, my very best option was a film like “Hancock” – which I would otherwise have only seen while trapped on an airplane* or if I were incarcerated and this was all that was being shown on movie night.
[*Editor's note: For our list of the Top 10 Actors Guaranteed to Ruin your Transatlantic Flight, click here]
The premise for the movie is promising and has some great satirical potential. Hancock does what Superman does, but whereas Superman is free to zip around skies that seem to have been cleared specifically for him, Hancock kills birds in mid-air collisions and has to dodge planes. What’s more, unlike Clark Kent – a character with the piercing depth of a carp – Hancock is a brooder, he hangs around in cheap bars, and when one woman remarks that she can smell booze on his breath, gets pissed off, “That’s because I’ve been drinking, bitch!” After the movie’s opening act, you get the mistaken impression that the whole film might be about a superhero with the disposition and bonhomie of a morning after Charles Bukowski.
We meet Hancock as he’s sleeping off a hangover on a park bench. Bullets bounce off him, he survives having a mack truck dumped on his head, but his superpowers do not extend to hangovers – cheap whiskey, it would appear, is this man’s kryptonite.
When Hancock stops a gang of street toughs from shooting up the freeway, he’s not troubled by hero-worship. If you’re a taxpayer forced to foot the bill to have a bad guys’ car removed from the spire of the Capital Records building, you might be less than appreciative of Hancock’s efforts. Later, he rescues a man whose car is stuck in the path of an oncoming train. He does this by slamming his fist into the oncoming train and causing a wreck. Rather than being applauded for saving the life of a stranger, he’s heckled: “Why didn’t you carry the car up and away rather than stopping the train with your fist?”, he’s asked.
Jason Bateman plays Ray Embry, the guy he rescues from the oncoming train. To pay Hancock back for saving his life, Embry offers him the only thing he can – unsolicited PR advice. He suggests that the first step towards Hancock improving his image would be to answer the countless subpoenas out there for him and actually serve some time in jail once he’s convicted. Hancock does this and the filmmakers get some comedic mileage out of a jail sequence – the prisoners, all of whom Hancock put there, are still inexplicably of the impression that they could take him in a square-go and attempt to bully him in the tradition of welcomes given to all new prison arrivals. He makes them pay for it by using one man’s head and another man’s anus in a way that is probably funny to 14-year-olds, but anatomically hard to believe.
After “Juno”, a deserving entrant in the blog/book “Stuff White People Like”, Jason Bateman it would appear is the face of the white liberal whose heart is bleeding so profusely it no longer circulates anything to important arteries. He has a Woodstock poster in his house and basically he makes Al Gore look like the kind of guy who would pee in or otherwise foul the town water supply. Aside from one scene in which he takes an unexpected and highly welcome swipe at Bono, Ray Embry is a grating weenie. At one point in the movie, Hancock helps a giddily drunk – this guy doesn’t get drunk, he gets squiffy – Embry to his bedroom and after that it seems like Hancock might make a move on Bateman’s wife Mary, played by Charlize Theron. This scene was one of the few in recent memory in which I can actually recall wishing a cuckolding on a character in a film.
The film’s second half springs out of the tensions between Hancock and Mary, and, while it did have the element of surprise on its side, this was tempered by the fact that it this major plot turn was ludicrous, arbitrary and that it came at a point when I had long ago stopped caring about how this film was going to resolve itself.
What we’re left with is a good performance from Will Smith, he makes a good mean-whiskey drunk and that’s no small compliment, and some fun goofs on the superhero genre – the best of these being Hancock’s attempt to save the life of a beached whale by flinging it back into the ocean… just his luck that a sailboat would be there to meet it at the landing point. Mostly though, it’s a movie with no concerted focus, one that starts out as fun satire and quickly degenerates into the very kind of film it was making fun of in the first place.
Vincent Ngo is credited with the screenplay and apparently it’s been “in development” for the past 10 years. When the film came out, Ngo kept out of the spotlight, saying only that his Hancock money would be used to finance a school in Vietnam. The original script was given the unfortunate title, “Tonight He Comes”, (insert your filthy joke here and swap them with your friends) and reportedly was completely different from what went up on screen. Collider.com tells us though that this was not the case of Hollywood stomping a great artistic vision; their hilarious review of Ngo’s original script ran with the headline, “Original Hancock Script Approximately 9 Billion Times Worse than Hacky Studio Rewrite”.
What we’re left with then is a film that was never that good. A fun idea and a solid premise that may have been turned into something satirical from start to finish, but one that’s used up in the first half hour of the film. One imagines that Ignatius, him of the sensitive heart-valve, wouldn’t have made it through this one.
Click here for a review of a movie that got the drunk superhero idea right.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Thanks for your comments Shark Guys. Very funny stuff! Hope to hear from you again. - TMC