Look up in the sky!
Is it a comedy?
Is it an action-thriller?
Is it a vaguely art-house-style drama?
No, It’s HanCOCK.
Priscilla and I went to a preview showing last week, I got stuck sitting beside a couple of stoned, stinking crusties who giggled and threw popcorn at each other throughout the entire film. Not just one or two pieces of popcorn, this was handfuls of the stuff being flung interspersed with pouring Coke over each others head. Mind, the drink probably only helped to wash their filthy bodies. She had a habit of pulling her dreads into a pony on top of her head and every time her arms were raised higher than waist level I was overcome with stench and almost passed out. This of course put me in great humour and the occasional barks of ’shut the FUCK UP!’ were laughed at and roundly ignored.
Apparently a lot of the movie was left on the cutting-room floor and it shows. There are obvious holes where something appears to have been explained in a previous scene so that things just happen that make no sense. For instance the ‘reveal’ of the bad guy was done in such a way that the audience was (I think) supposed to share an ‘OHMAGAWD’ moment. However since we had never SEEN the bad guy till that moment the impact was less than impressive.
Jason Bateman who has spent the last few years re-building his career with his work in Arrested Development and Juno is woefully wasted here as ‘nice-guy Ray’. Will Smith has a couple of good moments (ok, I laughed when he picked up the two frying pans) but spends the movie phoning it in. Charlize has transformed herself into ‘generic hollywood blonde #3785′ and gives the flattest performance of her life.
The movie veers from cartoon violence to ill-fitting soft-focus ’small moments’ in the characters lives - where nothing much happens but we are supposed to feel that this is ‘NOT JUST AN ACTION MOVIE - ITS DEEPER THAN THAT, YO!’ By the end of it you are tired of the heroics, the jokes and the ultra-slo-mo ‘grief’ of the characters. The plot has unravelled to the point where they really should have scrapped it and started over, the characters have become hateful, even the soundtrack shares the films’ multiple personality disorder and is more ‘epileptic’ than ‘eclectic’.
Maybe I should have taken a leaf out of the crusties joint and gotten stoned along with them. THEY didn’t seem to be having the same problems with the movie that I had -then again given their behaviour I don’t think they even knew they were in a cinema.
Hancock gets one big stinkin thumb down.
