Saturday, July 05, 2008

Review: Hancock

Here Be Spoilers:

An interesting film. What started off as a light hearted comedy segued into an Epic superhero story without any kind of explanation. The direction reminded me a little of Arrested Development, lots of fly-on-the-wall shots and shaky camera work.

There was material here for two or three movies:

  1. A comedy about an alcoholic superhero that meets a PR man, attempts to steal the PR man's hot wife, and comes up against some kind of whacky supervillain. Meanwhile the penultimate scene has the PR man having to choose between helping the superhero who attempted to take his wife and helping the villain who gives the PR man everything he ever dreamed of.
  2. An Epic, centuries-spanning quasi-classical tale of Gods and hubris, with no irony or reflection. Probably a fairly crap film.
  3. The same film as the previous one but with irony. With a dash of humour and a self-awareness of absurdity.
A decent but schizophrenic movie, I felt. It lacked a really bad supervillain as foil to Hancock - Charlize Theron doesn't count as she was kinda on the same side.

The ending was weak. It started well, and if I had only seen the trailer I would have been quite happy with the movie.

[image from mlive.com]

No comments: