I’ve heard a thing about Batman that I’d heard a lot before, but I’ve heard it a lot recently since the new movie came out, and that’s in a nutshell that “Superman is how America sees itself; Batman is how the rest of the world sees America.” Well, with Hancock perhaps we’ve found a rival superhero for the U.S. to identify with, lol. There’s a sequence here where Hancock meets the PR man played by Jason Bateman as Bateman’s car gets stuck on a trainline. The classic superhero setpiece, right? Yet just about any way Hancock can screw things up, Hancock does screw things up. We see glimpses of similar “rescues” early on the movie – H sure gets the job done, but usually at the cost of mucho avoidable carnage. It kinda reminded me of the opening of Team America. It’s very funny, but just a little frighteningly true.

I’m in severe catchup mode right now (I’ve actually had to force myself to skip a bunch of reviews including Son of Rambow, Zohan and Harold and Kumar just so I can start writing again – I’ll watch them all again and review them later in the year, I promise) so I’d heard plenty about this movie and the gist was pretty well summed up on Mark Kermode’s podcast in that apparently it’s “half a good movie” – the bad half allegedly coming when a “second superhero” shows up (avoiding spoilers).

Well, I was really enjoying the movie for a good hour or so till I began bracing myself for this revelation. What can I say but I was pleasantly surprised; and I really can’t see where the last third of this movie resembles such mindless knockabout finales as Transformers etc, the story is surprisingly bracing right to the close – I found the movie following the “revelation” closer to a good Mr. And Mrs. Smith than anything else (if that’s too much of a spoiler then I apologise – if you haven’t seen it by now then phooey :-P).

The only thing that really would’ve made it better for me would’ve been a little more of French Daegy, lol – what you see of him in the trailer/promo clip is just about all there is, and hilarious though he is, I don’t think that quite warrants the cuties tag

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 7:19 pm in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as comics, superhero. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.