But seriously, what's up with all them eagles? Does the other one have a totem animal too?
By the way, what is the appeal of watching two titans battle it out on the street, wrecking buildings and ripping up roads? Since it has been a recurring motif throughout the history of superhero and monster movies, there must be some allure to it. Here's what it is: the fantasy of being a bystander and having a built-in, unassailable excuse to take a day off. - Mick LaSalle's review of Hancock on sfgate.com. Emphasis mine.
There is something in us all that wants to see our cities destroyed, our great works brought low and our credit card records annihilated. It is that part that is turned on by Gojira/Godzilla, by the Hulk, by the Batmobile or Frank Martin's black BMW crashing through a skyscraper.
The superhero movie has finally arrived. With the exceptions of the first two Spiderman movies and X2, we've pretty much been waiting for the 2008 summer season. Now we have Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight and Hancock, all of which are fucking great. Let's talk Hancock.
I remember reading back in the antiquity of 2003 how the Matrix movies were intended to create a superhero for the big screen. Well guess what, where the Wachowski Brothers failed, Hancock just may succeed. They actually put some thought into this shit -- and had enough confidence in their convictions to not expodump the answers in the end. For that alone, the movie gets a pass from me. Beyond that though, it is solidly acted with Will Smith commiting to the character on a level that approaches Heath Ledger's Joker-as-loa method act.
The fear the mainstream critic holds for the the superhero and the fantastic (that is, when they aren't safely ensonced in mythology) is that it makes cardboard of so many of our assumptions. Authority is only power because we the plebes lack the real thing. In our world, there is only the former because hey, last I checked, neither Superman nor Achilles was real. In the real world, one woman cannot oppose an army or a government's laws - she would be crushed. Now imagine she could fly at hypersonic speed and crush shipping containers against her forehead. Now imagine she has a suit of powered armor. Now imagine she has glass knives and a nuke on a heart-monitor deadman switch strapped to her motorbike.
Before I continue any further, let me get the racialized reading right out of the way. Drunk black superhuman is saved by white man. He goes to jail. His weakness is a blond white woman (let's pretend to ignore that she loses her powers too). Yeah, whatever. Let's flip that around. If Ray had been Don Cheadle and Hancock Brad Pitt, we'd be talking Magical Negro right now, wouldn't we? This is better. Second is that nothing and I mean nothing in the course of the movie would have changed no matter how you shuffled the colour scheme around, which is exactly as it should be. If we talk gender though, aaah, then one would have a case. The woman hides her powers so as not to emasculate her mortal husband. The woman gets shot, the man gets pissed and saves the day. Even the mortal man gets to strike the final blow. Pfeh. Hollywood, you people need to work on this.
I love the thorougly casual displays of superhuman strength. He sharpens a makeshift weapon with his fingernail. He also shaves with them (which is all kinds of fucked up if you think about it). He claws drawings into the walls of his prison cell. Note the strong resemblance to hieroglyphics. I'd love to go over that scene with a pause button handy. I have the feeling the series mythology is fully revealed if you look closely enough.
When Mary and Hancock get into proximity and emotions are high, the temperature skyrockets; corn pops on the kitchen counter and so forth. When they fight, tornadoes, lightning, all kinds of wrath-of-god freak weather ensue. I wonder why. Could they be a Century Baby-type planetary defense system? Perhaps Gaia protests when her firstborn children quarrel. Perhaps they're drawing power from the earth and if they do it too near each other, they cause critical damage to the ecosystem. Maybe the second-to-last fight between two gods brought on the Ice Age. Maybe the one after that caused Pompeii. Then again, maybe they're more cosmic than that.They're yanking zero-point energy from the air and earth and violating thermodynamics. Maybe the power loss brought on by continuous proximity is a safety feature to keep them from collapsing local spacetime.
Hancock 3 could very well be the first Hollywood movie to feature the Omega Point.
If Hancock is Horus or rather, the person from whom the legends of Horus were drawn, which goddess is Mary? Having considered and discarded a number of Egyptian goddesses (Isis is Horus' mother, Hathor has been both wife and mother at different points as the mythological identity of Horus mutated. Astarte is a damn good possibility though) and given that she's pretty damn white, I'd offer the possibility that she might be from a different pantheon. I look forward to seeing other supers in the sequel as and when it comes.
I wonder if there's a Thoth. He was always my favourite Egyptian god. Powers like theirs means not having to learn anything. E'd be the exception, using immortality to become the ultimate polymath.
"Asshole" and "Crazy" - they both have trigger-words that make them flip out and fuck shit up. I wonder why.
Mary at one point says that Hancock is a sort of 'insurance policy of the gods', the only one of them who was more interested in saving the world than pairing off and growing old. Possibly, he was built that way. She had the inverse problem, she didn't particularly want to save the world but mostly just didn't want to die (compare with Wanted).
The plot point about how they keep running into each other and Hancock keeps getting hurt while protecting her from the mysterious "they" speaks to a cyclical form of destiny and the degree to which one can assert their will against fate (yet another parallel with Wanted). More pressingly, who are 'they'? An ancient conspiracy that tracks them down and kills them whenever they pair up or simply people they offended while empowered stumbling upon them in their time of vulnerability. I wonder too about the even more mysterious 'they' that built them. Mary was very specific on that verb. Gods? Aliens? Superadvanced AIs? Are they fallen angels? Bible says that the angels saw that that earth chicks were totally hot so they Fell ... in-between the spread legs of said chicks, started hitting that and that's how the Nephilim were born. Maybe the movie's mythology starts from that point, minus the half-breeds. Note that Aaron isn't her kid, yet she has an active healthy sex life with her husband. A parallel with Highlander rears its head here; it makes sense for immortals, especially artificial ones, to be sterile.
Verdict? The movie is waaay better than it had to be and sets up several fascinating sequel possibilities. And it's a thousand times better than My Super Ex-Girlfriend!
PS
Hancock fails the Bechdel Test. So does Wanted - woefully at that. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor passes it reasonably well though.
There is something in us all that wants to see our cities destroyed, our great works brought low and our credit card records annihilated. It is that part that is turned on by Gojira/Godzilla, by the Hulk, by the Batmobile or Frank Martin's black BMW crashing through a skyscraper.
The superhero movie has finally arrived. With the exceptions of the first two Spiderman movies and X2, we've pretty much been waiting for the 2008 summer season. Now we have Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight and Hancock, all of which are fucking great. Let's talk Hancock.
I remember reading back in the antiquity of 2003 how the Matrix movies were intended to create a superhero for the big screen. Well guess what, where the Wachowski Brothers failed, Hancock just may succeed. They actually put some thought into this shit -- and had enough confidence in their convictions to not expodump the answers in the end. For that alone, the movie gets a pass from me. Beyond that though, it is solidly acted with Will Smith commiting to the character on a level that approaches Heath Ledger's Joker-as-loa method act.
The fear the mainstream critic holds for the the superhero and the fantastic (that is, when they aren't safely ensonced in mythology) is that it makes cardboard of so many of our assumptions. Authority is only power because we the plebes lack the real thing. In our world, there is only the former because hey, last I checked, neither Superman nor Achilles was real. In the real world, one woman cannot oppose an army or a government's laws - she would be crushed. Now imagine she could fly at hypersonic speed and crush shipping containers against her forehead. Now imagine she has a suit of powered armor. Now imagine she has glass knives and a nuke on a heart-monitor deadman switch strapped to her motorbike.
Before I continue any further, let me get the racialized reading right out of the way. Drunk black superhuman is saved by white man. He goes to jail. His weakness is a blond white woman (let's pretend to ignore that she loses her powers too). Yeah, whatever. Let's flip that around. If Ray had been Don Cheadle and Hancock Brad Pitt, we'd be talking Magical Negro right now, wouldn't we? This is better. Second is that nothing and I mean nothing in the course of the movie would have changed no matter how you shuffled the colour scheme around, which is exactly as it should be. If we talk gender though, aaah, then one would have a case. The woman hides her powers so as not to emasculate her mortal husband. The woman gets shot, the man gets pissed and saves the day. Even the mortal man gets to strike the final blow. Pfeh. Hollywood, you people need to work on this.
I love the thorougly casual displays of superhuman strength. He sharpens a makeshift weapon with his fingernail. He also shaves with them (which is all kinds of fucked up if you think about it). He claws drawings into the walls of his prison cell. Note the strong resemblance to hieroglyphics. I'd love to go over that scene with a pause button handy. I have the feeling the series mythology is fully revealed if you look closely enough.
When Mary and Hancock get into proximity and emotions are high, the temperature skyrockets; corn pops on the kitchen counter and so forth. When they fight, tornadoes, lightning, all kinds of wrath-of-god freak weather ensue. I wonder why. Could they be a Century Baby-type planetary defense system? Perhaps Gaia protests when her firstborn children quarrel. Perhaps they're drawing power from the earth and if they do it too near each other, they cause critical damage to the ecosystem. Maybe the second-to-last fight between two gods brought on the Ice Age. Maybe the one after that caused Pompeii. Then again, maybe they're more cosmic than that.They're yanking zero-point energy from the air and earth and violating thermodynamics. Maybe the power loss brought on by continuous proximity is a safety feature to keep them from collapsing local spacetime.
Hancock 3 could very well be the first Hollywood movie to feature the Omega Point.
If Hancock is Horus or rather, the person from whom the legends of Horus were drawn, which goddess is Mary? Having considered and discarded a number of Egyptian goddesses (Isis is Horus' mother, Hathor has been both wife and mother at different points as the mythological identity of Horus mutated. Astarte is a damn good possibility though) and given that she's pretty damn white, I'd offer the possibility that she might be from a different pantheon. I look forward to seeing other supers in the sequel as and when it comes.
I wonder if there's a Thoth. He was always my favourite Egyptian god. Powers like theirs means not having to learn anything. E'd be the exception, using immortality to become the ultimate polymath.
"Asshole" and "Crazy" - they both have trigger-words that make them flip out and fuck shit up. I wonder why.
Mary at one point says that Hancock is a sort of 'insurance policy of the gods', the only one of them who was more interested in saving the world than pairing off and growing old. Possibly, he was built that way. She had the inverse problem, she didn't particularly want to save the world but mostly just didn't want to die (compare with Wanted).
The plot point about how they keep running into each other and Hancock keeps getting hurt while protecting her from the mysterious "they" speaks to a cyclical form of destiny and the degree to which one can assert their will against fate (yet another parallel with Wanted). More pressingly, who are 'they'? An ancient conspiracy that tracks them down and kills them whenever they pair up or simply people they offended while empowered stumbling upon them in their time of vulnerability. I wonder too about the even more mysterious 'they' that built them. Mary was very specific on that verb. Gods? Aliens? Superadvanced AIs? Are they fallen angels? Bible says that the angels saw that that earth chicks were totally hot so they Fell ... in-between the spread legs of said chicks, started hitting that and that's how the Nephilim were born. Maybe the movie's mythology starts from that point, minus the half-breeds. Note that Aaron isn't her kid, yet she has an active healthy sex life with her husband. A parallel with Highlander rears its head here; it makes sense for immortals, especially artificial ones, to be sterile.
Verdict? The movie is waaay better than it had to be and sets up several fascinating sequel possibilities. And it's a thousand times better than My Super Ex-Girlfriend!
PS
Hancock fails the Bechdel Test. So does Wanted - woefully at that. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor passes it reasonably well though.