I’ll be checking this movie out in the next week or so, and though I’m not really a Will Smith fan, the notion of a semi-realistic take on the superhero genre looks somewhat intriguing.
I’m a little put off by the quantity of information revealed in various trailers as the film’s release approaches, though. Rather than being an alien, Smith’s character “woke up in a hospital” with his abilities and it looks like just has he starts to come to terms with his abilities, he starts to lose them (“you’re becoming mortal!”).
So what is this, Powers for Algernon?
[sub]Thanks, I’m here all week! Try the veal. I really will see the movie and discuss it later on.[/sub]
That’s really disappointing to hear. The premise is terrific and could have made for a fantastic movie. I’ll probably still see it, since I’m riding the whole superhero wave right now, but I don’t have much hope for it.
It looked great until I saw that it was Will Smith starring in it. Not because Will is a bad actor, but the movies he is in are all cliched crapfests that make little sense. Omega man, for example, looked good in the trailers, but it was a crap movie. Hancock looks to be the same.
I was so disappointed because from the subway ads, I just saw Will Smith and the name Hancock, so I thought this was going to be a biopic of the jazz piano player Herbie Hancock. Then I saw it was another super hero movie, albeit with a different take. I’ll probably see this one after it’s out on DVD.
What can I say? I still see ‘Bass Masters’ in the TV listings and my heart leaps with the hope that it’ll be a show about Victor Wooten, Tony Levin and Ron Carter. Then I see the fish and my disillusionment is palpable.
Most of the negative reviews are confirming what I suspected about the movie from the various trailers.
When my g/f and I first saw a trailer to this in the movie theaters, it was very clearly being positioned as a comedy (perhaps dark-ish comedy, but still obviously a comedy). Since then, the trailers promoting the movie on t.v. have seemed to present the movie as a drama or as a action movie.
This sent off warning bells to me about the movie. If the film studio cannot settle on how to position the movie, it is a likely indication that it is not put together very well and clearly not screening well with test audiences so they’re grasping around for some traction.
Will Smith seems like a nice guy and all, but his FX movies suck. Every last one of them, IMO, with the possible exception of the first MiB movie, which was OK.
My sister and I had the same experience. At first, we thought the movie looked like a pretty good send-up of the whole super hero genre, and then we just got very, very confused. It’s never a good sign when the studio doesn’t know how to market a movie. I honestly thought that the first trailers were probably more accurate and then studio head panicked and realized that people wanted to see Will Smith kill things and blow shit up on the 4th of July, thus the change. Judging from the reviews, the change is probably a result of the fact that the movie itself is a mess.
I at first thought it would be a rousing tale of how John Hancock used to throw whales at the British naval fleet. Imagine my disappointment…
Herbie Hancock is not only still alive, he’s still performing - don’t they usually only make bio-pics on people who are either dead, or old and retired?
The reviews are largely negative, but the impression I’m getting is less “bad movie” than “fascinating, overambitious failure,” which is always interesting. And some reviewers realy like the film - including the *New York Times * and, bizzarely, the New Yorker (I’m not counting Ebert, here, as he loves everything and everybody).
I think I’m going to see the film. Most movies fail by not trying hard enough; it’s rare to see a movie that fails from trying too hard. That’s practically Terry Gilliam territory.
Usually this is the case - but sometimes it can mean that the story is actually somewhat original. Hollywood has a real hard time dealing with originality. (I have no idea if this is true in the case of Hancock, as I haven’t seen it yet)
Really? You think so? I actually get more interested when a studio doesn’t know how to market a movie, because while the movie in question may well be crap, it could also mean that the movie is not cut from a cloth made from a specific formula that’s easy to package and market. That could be good. Or not, but it’s more interesting than a movie where you pretty much know exactly what’s going to happen based on the trailers and that’s exactly what happens.
Hancock is not cut from a cloth made from a specific formula that’s easy to package and market. I saw it last week at a sneak preview and liked it quite a bit. It’s not going to be my favorite film of the year or anything (I’m sure that nothing, but NOTHING, will shake The Fall from that spot), far from it, but I thought it was enjoyable and interesting. I knew immediately that most people were going to hate it, that it would get terrible reviews, and that, without even reading any of them, the main theme would be “it doesn’t know what it wants to be, a comedy or a drama.” Because it’s both, and that’s going to upset a lot of people. The previews are misleading. As with The Bucket List, which was marketed as a comedy but turned out to be a drama, so goes Hancock. It does start out seeming like a comedy (all the funny bits are in the trailer) but then turns serious. Kinda roll-your-eyes serious, in parts, but it kept me interested because it wasn’t going at all in the direction I thought it was heading, which I found refreshing. For one thing, there’s no main villain Hancock has to fight. Not that there’s aren’t bad guys, sure there are, but no Joker or Penguin or Doc Ock-type villain.
Love is the villain in Hancock, which threw me for a huge loop. Obviously it threw a lot of reviewers for a loop too, but the difference is that I found it fascinating. Maybe it is a “fascinating, overambitious failure” but good for the producers and Smith for trying it. I would watch a sequel.
The movie review in the New Yorker also spoke favorably about Hollywood Hackmeister General Akiva Goldsman, who’s one of the producers on Hancock, so I’m currently operating on the assumption that the reviewer had suffered from some sort of debilitating head trauma shortly before writing the review.
I, too, was excited by the premise and the trailer I’d seen, but extremely disappointed by the reviews. I’ll usually see a movie despite bad criticism if it seems interesting to me, because I don’t expect my taste to always match up with the critical consensus (though more often than not, I find that it does), but the last time I did that was with The Happening, so I’ve gotten a bit weary of that approach…
Equipoise’s review has given me some new hope, though, I guess I’ll see it if I find anyone willing to accompany me.
Yeah, usually. It’s just my bizarre world view at work - say ‘Hancock’ and the first name that comes to mind is ‘Herbie’.
Another huge strike against a bio-pic of Herbie Hancock is that his life outside of music isn’t that interesting. He’s a great musician who hasn’t had a major battle against drugs or alcohol, he’s not a womanizer, he’s not crazy, I’ve never heard of him facing more racism than any other black person; he’s just a really, really good jazz musician.
I’ve long ago learned that just because I’d be interested in a story, it doesn’t mean anyone in Hollywood is willing to tell that story to me. Still, they got my hopes up for a while there.
I thought it was good. Sure not high drama, but a very entertaining movie. Some very good moments by Will Smith as he discovers more about himself. There were a few “WTF” moments that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I still found it a very entertaining movie.
