My review of Hancock: B / 8.7

As always with my reviews, I first need to say that I will probably dive into some spoiler territory with this review, so please don’t bother to read this entire post if you don’t want to encounter any spoiler material, even if I include it accidentally without forewarning. If you don’t want to read this post, you should know that:

• I ultimately rate this movie an B on the education scale
• a 8.7 on the 10-point Richter scale
• There is enough “adult” language in this movie for a protective parent to not want to take their 10-year olds. Parents, if that is you, don’t take your kids unless you want them to learn how to say “asshole” very clearly. Plus there is a smattering of other off-color phrases worse than that.

With that information, you can safely end reading this post now. Oh, and there’s a bonus scene in the credits, so don’t leave early.

This movie was very highly anticipated and very, VERY broadly advertised. It did seem that I saw some form of advertisement for this movie nearly everywhere I went – even as far as to find the extended preview DVDs at Best Buy. So, naturally I went to see it on its day of release.

I believe the premise is pretty clear from the previews. Hancock is a superhero guy who apparently has either a disrespect or an unawareness for the “rules” of being a superhero. While he may indeed be helping fight crime and whatnot that superheroes do, he usually causes more problems than he solves by helping.

Overall, I thought the movie was acted very well by the main characters. Though it’s hard to bring a sense of believability to this kind of story, I felt like the scenes were rather well-constructed and they were usually dual-themed – with a main story being accented by subtleties here and there to contribute to its overall flavor. Will this movie win any Oscars? Probably not – but I did think the visual effects were good overall and they weren’t necessarily overdone just because there was spare CPU to burn on the rendering boxes.

So, I want to talk a little bit about the movie itself. Within the spoiler bars are things that happen in the movie that are not covered in the previews. I will say that the previews were very good at hiding the true story, so please don’t read the spoiler section if you are going to see this movie and haven’t yet.

******SPOILER ALERT******
If you click through the article to read the rest, there is a good chance you’ll find a spoiler here or there. No refunds.

Because eyes do wander with curiosity, first I want to say that Charlize Theron was pretty incredibly hot in this movie. Though her performance in this film doesn’t compare to “Monster” – mainly because she’s a supporting character here – I thought her scenes were very delicate for her character, and that each one had a wide array of possible outcomes, but that she absolutely nailed her role. There is only one scene that I felt was difficult – it was the scene where she is explaining to Ray that Hancock sneezed and that’s why there was a hole in the house from the kitchen.

Now. Holy shit. I wasn’t blown away by the movie, but I was in complete shock at the twist in this story, and the way it was delivered just had me thinking “man, I didn’t see THAT coming”. I think it was one of the most interesting subplot deliveries I have ever seen, honestly. That carries a “sorta good, sorta bad, but definitely unexpected” meaning. I’m not even going to give it away in this spoiler, even though people reading this spoiler have likely seen the movie or don’t care to see it. Let someone else ruin it for you, I want to hold this one in.

The implication of the twist was, however, a little weak. I really thought there was going to be something elegant that transitioned the story’s focus into the twist, but lo and behold there wasn’t an explanation. I felt like Hancock’s mortality and his resuscitation was a little weak, but it wasn’t completely far-fetched from the story’s “rules” and the parallel scenes at that point helped that along a little. If this could have been a little more well-done, I’d rate the movie higher.

The last scene was pretty much cheese, but I thought it put a nice wrapper on the whole story and proved out that Hancock did change from the inside out.
******END SPOILER******

Overall, I give this movie an B. It’s a definitely go-see film if you liked the previews. I’ll be interested to see how it fares against Wall-E this weekend at the box office.