HANCOCK
(Review)

For the moment, Peter Berg’s Hancock is a strong contender for Most Surprising Film of the Year.
Ostensibly, it’s about John Hancock (the global box office behemoth that is Will Smith), an apparently misanthropic superhero taken to bouts of drunken, destructive hi-jinx that only vaguely resemble the usual do-gooder acts of your average spandex set.
Hancock’s turbulent life takes a turn though, when he crosses paths with Ray Embrey (Arrested Development’s Jason Bateman, reunited with Berg, his director on The Kingdom), a struggling PR man who decides that the only way he can show his gratitude to the troubled hero is by rehabilitating his public image.
Ray’s decision to give Hancock an image do-over also brings the superhuman into the orbits of Ray’s wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), and son Aaron (Friday Night Lights’ Jae Head).
It’s from this basic set-up that Hancock takes off, and, much like one of the hero’s intoxicated flights, does some interesting and unexpected twists and turns over its surprisingly short, but awesomely sweet 92-minute running time.


As he is wont to do, Smith grabs the audience’s attention and sympathy with a moving and humourous performance as the embattled Hancock, informing the despised superman with both a gruff, powerful presence, and a bruised, brooding vulnerability.
And, alongside Smith, Theron and Bateman also submit noteworthy turns, grounding the narrative’s fantastic comic book premise with a tender (and, when required, comedic) humanity, making Hancock, among other things, a surprisingly moving film.


The blueprint for all of this though, is most definitely Hancock’s script, written by Vincent Ngo (who wrote for the BMW The Hire shorts and TV’s The Hunger) and X-Files alum Vince Gilligan; Gilligan’s involvement is one of the biggest reasons why I was curious to see Hancock.
Outlining a very atypical comic book-inspired film, Gilligan and Ngo’s script constantly subverts expectations, taking Hollywood’s current summer tentpole of choice—the superhero film—and playing some daring games with its conventions, ultimately bringing it to places—both emotional and imaginative—it hasn’t really been to before.
It also hits, rather spot-on, the notions that true heroism requires a certain amount of self-control and self-sacrifice, and that a dream to change the world for the better is never a bad thing, no matter how distant and unrealistic it may seem.


In this day and age when comic book superheroes have become big budget mainstream entertainment, Hancock is a wonderful antidote to the multitude of less-than-inspired cinematic spandex adventures that tend to crowd the multiplex, middling movies where every mask and cape is merely another tool designed to ring the global box office tills and move some merchandise.
Hancock is also a superhero film for our cynical times, an enjoyable rollercoaster ride that entertains, moves, and inspires.


In bucking the trend and going for the untried and untested, Hancock is exactly the sort of superhero film that Hollywood needs more of, if it hopes to keep the movement vibrant and alive.
Could I have asked for more? Yes. I could have done with some more running time, so we could get to see more character reactions and interactions on screen, making the narrative’s emotional arc a smoother ride.
Still, even with that imperfection, Hancock is a pleasant, solid surprise.
After all, better this than an Nth installment of some tired, overextended spandex franchise, right?


(Hancock U.S. and Japanese OS’s courtesy of impawards.com [designs by BLT & Associates]; images courtesy of beyondhollywood.com.)

I AM LEGEND
(Review)

Emma Thompson destroys the world.
I love it, I love it, I love it! She may have missed out on playing God in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, but boy, she can really bring down the house, can’t she?
In an all-too-brief (and uncredited) cameo, Thompson plays Dr. Alice Krippin, who, in engineering a viral cure for cancer, turns those poor souls unlucky enough not to be Will Smith, into hyper-active, sunlight-fearing CGI constructs.
All this Hollywood insanity can be found in Francis Lawrence’s big budget take on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (by way of the script for the 1971 Charlton Heston-starrer, The Omega Man).

For this latest re-do, megastar Smith is Robert Neville, the last uninfected man in New York. Roaming the overgrown, deserted streets by day with his trusty dog Sam—he’s completely immune to the Krippin Virus, while Sam, like all canines, is immune to the airborne strain—holed up in his nice, well-stocked (and fortified) digs by night, Neville continues to try to find a cure for the virus, some three years after the original outbreak.
Thus, for the most part, I Am Legend asks us to spend about an hour and a half watching Smith do his thing. Fortunately, Smith is an A-lister who can actually act, so that part of the equation is dandy.
Smith’s Neville is likeable enough, his rapport with Sam easy and amiable. Soon though, the cracks begin to show, as, realistically, given his situation, Neville really isn’t all there anymore. It’s interesting to watch him go from a subdued version of his usual Will Smith cinema persona, to a slightly crazed semi-loon complete with mini-meltdowns (the one involving Shrek is probably the most disturbing).
So, given that this is nearly a one-man show, Smith effectively carries his own weight. The script meanwhile—which is based on the ’71 adaptation—by Mark Protosevich (The Cell and the upcoming Thor) and Akiva Goldsman (who may have won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, but will always be remembered by yours truly as the man responsible for inflicting the script of Batman & Robin upon my delicate sensibilities), smoothly gives Smith leeway to play action hero, obsessed scientist, haunted father, and borderline nutcase, and the man doesn’t miss a beat.
But, like Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, the problem isn’t so much in the script (though the third act developments may prove a tad too Hollywood for some) as it is in the pixels.

For some reason, director Lawrence chose to forego the use of human actors to play the KV-infected because he wasn’t quite getting what he was looking for in their performances. What that was, I’m not exactly sure: an air of gross artificiality?
The CGI bits are dodgy, and quite frankly, terribly distracting. As a result, you have a film that has some genuinely moving emotional scenes (notably, Neville’s regular midday idylls), but which falls hard and flat when it comes to the sequences that are supposed to be thrilling and tense.
Actually, the only effective thrill sequence comes when Sam inadvertently chases a deer into a dark, apparently abandoned building, and we catch our first glimpses of the infected. The build up, as Neville desperately tries to find the dog without waking the slumbering occupants, is taut, a well-constructed tension that snaps into so many brittle shards when the CGI monsters wake up and give chase.
The things look patently fake, so, knowing that Smith is out there running from and struggling with a bunch of pixels kind of bursts the bubble, you know? (The fact that Dash Mihok—who recently appeared in Pushing Daisies’ “Pigeon” episode—gets third billing as the “Alpha Male,” is truly odd, considering he’s not recognizable beneath the computer-generated, mo-cap sheen, and the performance doesn’t strike me as one that reaches an Andy Serkis-level.)

It’s sad since I Am Legend could have been a legitimate Hollywood portrait of a viral apocalypse, instead of the hobbled, compromised creature that it is.
Anyone looking for white-knuckle, viral apocalypse thrills would do well to look towards the 28 Days/Weeks Later area of zombie cinema. I Am Legend, while certainly better than Lawrence’s previous effort, the lamentable Constantine, may have a beating heart, but it clearly lacks any real, organic teeth to make it a formidable and threatening cinematic construct.*

* Of course, given that I Am Legend has made, at the time of this review’s writing, a staggering US total of $228 million in just 4 weeks of release (that puts it at # 6 on the US Top Ten Films released in 2007, having just edged out The Bourne Ultimatum by a measly million; it’s also raking in the moolah across the globe—as of January 1, it already had a cumulative gross of $126 million, from 25 markets), shows that the film has found an audience, so what do I know?

Parting shot: Reviews of 28 Weeks Later, Beowulf, and Constantine, as well as episodic recaps of Pushing Daisies, can be found in the Archive.

(I Am Legend OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)