Santa: “What would you like for Christmas?” Girl: “My own credit card.” - Brazil

By Lisa Fary

The Hancock you saw advertised? That’s not really Hancock. The actual Hancock is far better than that feel-good, misunderstood hero crap you saw in the commercials. It’s actually one of the best superhero movies out there, if not the best, and I can’t figure out why it was one of the most hated movies of 2008.

Here is what some have said about Hancock:

“. . . the most pathetic, cheesy ending I’ve seen to a movie in a summer filled with such moments.”

(I’m willing to bet this person also disliked The Iron Giant, which I consider a litmus test for heart. As in, like, having one.)

“It’s not about anything. It’s a series of incidents, and then it’s over, and nothing is truly accomplished.  The film’s ‘big villain,’ such as it is, is a total wash-out, a threat for no reason other than to stage a preposterous ‘emotional’ climax.”

There are many more. The common thread I found in most reviews was that the first part - the advertised part - was the best and everything else was A) bad, B) confusing, C) not funny, D) all of the above.  What bothers me is the subtext of that, which is:

Drunken black man making the world laugh at his buffoonery = OK.

Purpose driven black man with hot, emotional connection to a white woman = Not OK.

Really? Are those people only comfortable with a black superhero on screen if he’s a drunken buffoon? Would they have been more comfortable with the rest of the movie if Hancock was white?

Beyond that, there are some other things in play with Hancock that contributed to the critical hatred for it:

Hancock doesn’t follow the superhero formula. Batman Begins, Dark Knight, and Iron Man, as good as they were, all kept to the superhero formula, not really daring to do something - anything - different.

Hancock doesn’t have a big, bad villain threatening the city or releasing frickin’ sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their frickin’ heads into a children’s swimming pool. Hancock doesn’t need a villain, not this time, because good vs. bad/ saving the city wasn’t the point. If there’s a sequel, he’s going to need a Lex Luthor or a Syndrome to go up against. This time, his first time out, this is about identity.  This is about purpose.

Hancock has a tension that you don’t get with Spider-Man or Dark Knight or Iron Man. You know those guys aren’t going to die, not really. When you get down to it, they’re corporately owned and killing off the hero is bad for business. Marvel and DC know it, too.  Why else does Jean Grey keep coming back from the dead in the comics? Why else would Professor Xavier psychically take over a vegetable after being disintegrated by the Phoenix? The viewer doesn’t have that security with Hancock.  If it served the story, he could actually die.

The movie is less about fighting crime via slapstick comedy than it is about identity and making choices.  Not even the choices we mere humans consider to be the big ones: college majors, tile or vinyl flooring, city or suburb. Those are quite small and inconsequential when compared to something like being forced to choose between being with the one who was made for you and living an ordinary life ending in death or being away from that person and serving a higher purpose. Because you can’t have both. Not in Hancock’s world.

You also can’t perform a good deed without getting pooped on, which is true for our reality as well. You could pull a guy from a burning car, getting him out just before it explodes, saving his life, only to have him sue you for cutting his arm on the broken glass. Hancock and Ray, his PR guy, really have the same goals, but approach them differently and for albeit different reasons. Ray tries to get a charitable cause off the ground to save people; Hancock is more direct.  They both try because it’s the right thing to do and they get pretty much the same reaction from people: rejection, derision, pooped on.

Hancock is a different kind of superhero movie with a different kind of hero. It gets the physics right, it gets the consequences right, it gets superheroes right.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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