Hancock (2008)
Directed by Peter Berg
Hancock is a down-and-out superhero who's forced to employ a PR expert to help repair his image when the public grows weary of all the damage he's inflicted during his lifesaving heroics. The agent's idea of imprisoning the antihero to make the world miss him proves successful, but will Hancock stick to his new sense of purpose or slip back into old habits?
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17 films that influenced Hancock
What critics say influenced Hancock
It’s completely borrowed from Back to the Future and Marty McFly not wanted to be called chicken.
(In the film's laziest set of jokes, Hancock is set off by the word "asshole," a gag last used to good effect in 1985's Back to the Future .)
"Hancock" brings to mind another movie with a similar desire to humanize a superhero, M. Night Shyamalan's underappreciated follow-up to " The Sixth Sense ", " Unbreakable ".
Like M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, this film wants to go a little deeper than the usual glossy approach to superheroes.
Will Smith as an anonymous “John Hancock” who can’t remember his genesis is branded by the film as a Bruce Willis-like “Unbreakable” character, but who the heck is Charlize Theron?
"Hancock" works the slickest twist on the superhero movie since "Unbreakable."
His only remnant of the past is two movie tickets to “Frankenstein” (1931) starring Boris Karloff.
All he knows is he has two tickets to Frankenstein from 1931 in a keepsake case.
In only one example of how out of touch these filmmakers are, no one on the set appears to have had any knowledge of basic physics, not to mention the release date of James Whale’s “Frankenstein” (1931).
Its originality actually might not seem so novel, too, once you consider the 1983 film “The Return of Captain Invincible”.
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The notion of a superhero whose surly attitude and destructive tendencies have made him a pariah with the very people he has sworn to protect is admittedly not quite as original as the creators of “Hancock” would have you believe--the idea has been previously explored in works ranging from the very first “Underdog” episode to such box-office hits as “The Incredibles” and “Superman III” to the 1983 cult oddity “The Return of Captain Invincible” (a spoof in which alcoholic former superhero Alan Arkin is called back into service two decades after being labeled a Communist sympathizer in order to defeat megalomaniacal villain Christopher Lee--oh, did I mention that the film was also a musical?) with varying degrees of success.
It's like "Lethal Weapon" all over again, with one man doing the job of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.
Because it is a film that is trying to skewer audience expectations for a wildly expensive big-screen extravaganza (even as it tries to market itself as just such a thing in order to attract viewers) by offering them a self-conscious spoof and because it features an enormously popular actor trying to subvert his on-screen persona by doing something more off-beat than his typical output, I suspect that many of the negative reviews for “Hancock” will cite illusions to two other films that tried to do just that and were widely reviled by critics and audiences for their efforts--the Bruce Willis vehicle “Hudson Hawk” and the infamous Arnold Schwarzenegger epic “Last Action Hero.”
Hancock's opening segments occasionally call to mind the likes of the Arnold Schwarzenegger spoof, Last Action Hero, and the Pixar animated superhero movie, The Incredibles.
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It’s an origins story that dips its toe into many potential themes, including the superhero-in-the-suburbs idea “The Incredibles” investigated more thoroughly, without saying much about any of them.
A similar starting point -- a superhero who has worn out his welcome with the public -- was developed elegantly and imaginatively in "The Incredibles."
Hancock's opening segments occasionally call to mind the likes of the Arnold Schwarzenegger spoof, Last Action Hero, and the Pixar animated superhero movie, The Incredibles.
Audiences are already abundantly familiar with superheroes and their origin stories, and we’ve even seen a few instances (as in “The Incredibles”) of people with super powers having to grapple with everyday nuisances like lawsuits and liability.
The problem is that while this particular approach can be enormously effective when used in a crime drama along the lines of “Heat” or “Miami Vice,” it doesn’t work at all when deployed in the service of either a comedy or the kind of fantasy-based action that “Hancock” deals in--the style is so oppressive that it alone kills a number of jokes and it never lets us get a decent look at the scenes of spectacle.