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“America! F@#K Yeah!”
By Kyle | June 27, 2008
Why is the above line, from the classic “Team America: World Police,” possibly the most ringing statement of the decade at the movies? It is stupid. It is bold, aggressive, overconfident, offensive, childish, churlish. Underneath all that it is also self-deprecating, memorable and clever. It is a lot like America.
“Hancock,” directed by Peter Berg, who also made last year’s pro-America Middle East crime drama “The Kingdom,” is superficially a blockbuster aimed at the masses who like to see cars thrown around and wish they could fly, but for those who read into a film it’s a sly allegory about America’s place in the world today. (I’m going to talk about the highly entertaining first half, not the more problematic second half, because I can’t talk about the latter without revealing a major twist and because the allegory is more or less dropped in the second half, which seems like it came from a different script entirely.) (And by the way, don’t read any other reviews of this movie if you don’t want the surprise spoiled for you. A lot of critics think that it’s ok to drop a hint so obvious that you can guess the meaning.)
Hancock is a guy whose symbol is the eagle. He’s the “only one of my kind,” a lone, lonely superpower. He’s unpolished, maybe even swinish. He does the right thing (in Winston Churchill’s words) only eventually. He whales on pissy little Frenchmen named Michel and his name, of course, is in a sense the name of the first American. (When else should his story be told but on the Fourth of July weekend?)
Hancock didn’t ask to be the most powerful force in the world, and after taking a lot of abuse about his methods he is having trouble coping with himself. You might say his personal sense of whether he’s headed in the wrong direction or right direction is at an all time low. He sleeps the days away on benches with a bottle of booze.
When roused to duty he calls to mind Colin Powell’s remark that America didn’t ask to be the world’s policeman–but who else can you call when you need a cop? In the opening scenes, Hancock is called upon by a little boy who points out that L.A. television is showing (what L.A. television is always showing:) a freeway chase. Some bad guys (they are, like most of the villains in the movie, generic, which represents a perhaps forgivable loss of guts on the part of the filmmakers) are blasting away with machine guns on the freeways, so Hancock flies on over, rips the roof of their car off, plunks himself down in the back seat and tries to restore order by calm negotiation. But sometimes criminals, like terrorists, just won’t listen to reason. Hancock is therefore obliged to get a little inappropriate.
The point of Hancock is that though he keeps saving the lives of the citizens of L.A. from the criminals who bedevil them, everybody hates him. He can’t just apprehend a bad guy by reading him a sternly-issued statement; he has to throw the scumbag’s car through a skyscraper. Of collateral damage there is much.
But sometimes Hancock has no choice but to overreact, and sometimes he’s just careless and sloppy about the details, even as he manages to leave things much better than he found them. Hancock’s m.o., in other words, is Berg’s defense of the American war-making apparatus: taking care of business with the world’s supervillains but often creating a mess in the process.
The police want Hancock (no jail will hold him) and he’s the target of major lawsuits coming in from every direction. A PR exec (Jason Bateman) is nearly killed when his car gets stuck on some train tracks, but when Hancock rescues him in a less-than-ideal way, the citizens around him complain that Hancock has runined things yet again. They are correct: Hancock could have saved the day without anyone or any car getting hurt, yet either couldn’t be bothered to do so or was too thick-headed to see the simple solution. Maybe, though, in a life-and-death situation, he simply did the best he could under pressure. Maybe the complainers aren’t seeing the big picture.
What if Hancock made an effort to be something other than the coarse bully who ignores the advice of others? Witness the Wussification of Hancock. Do we want a hero who submits mewling to censure from authorities (Hancock allows himself to be arrested)? Do we want a Hancock tied up in group therapy that looks as dull and pointless as a UN hearing?
Around the edges of the movie Berg fires birdshot at political correctness and liberal institutions. A bad guy, we learn, has teamed up with a gang of graduate students. When Hancock rescues a beached whale and flings it into the sea, it has the side benefit of destroying a Greenpeace ship. Hancock approaches a woman cop who is under a hurricane of automatic weapons fire at a bank robbery but, before he can help her, has to run through every inane regulation in the rulebook: “Do I have permission to touch your body?” and so on. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. Army now requires men to say this when adjusting the gear of females, since years ago I saw an NCO was obliged to give this spiel to a female underling in Britain’s Territorial Army.) Sometimes there is truth in crudeness. Hancock is as brash as the signature of his namesake. As he puts it at one feisty moment: “You’re all idiots.”
Topics: Movies |
June 27th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Kyle good review. I wonder if Will Smith could grasp the meaning of the character he is playing. When I saw the trailer for this flick I had a sense it was about what you have implied it is.
And any reading about what kind of guy Peter Berg is? He seems a bit not one of the establishment guys in Hollywood.
June 28th, 2008 at 3:13 am
The whole idea of this movie is insane. I’ve seen one scene at a restaurant in where Hancock describes his beginnings. If anyone, anybody wakes up with such amazing power. What would they do? I would personally travel the entire world with a camera and tour it all, kill a whole bunch of terrorists for sport, demolish entire countries like Cuba, N. Korea, Turkey, CIS and Iran for a week long summer bash. Maybe just get sick of humanity and attempt a trip across the galaxy.
Anyone here know of a British comic book called Marvelman? Maybe on the other darker side, decide humanity ain’t worth living and start killing they all (since he’s in California that’s where it begins.. wait, I don’t think anyones going to notice till he goes to another state!) and just for shucks and yuckles, grab someone who’s deeply in love of an idea and make a mockery of it and then ask them, “Can you fly?” as he drops them from a thousand feet up.
The whole concept of Hancock is a joke. You start with an amnesiac with no recollection of his past and you think he would end up a bum?! Since he’s black, why wouldn’t he try to find himself and learn in the end how the nasty whitey oppressed his kin. Goes to the white house and on the massive media squeeze the president’s head like a zit. Declare that all government positions belong only to a black man and rule as Presidente for all eternity?
Oh, that tossing of the kid into the air ? The massive shock of being thrown would’ve stopped his heart and catching him like that would be akin to jumping from the twin towers at the top to the bottom.. Ever dropped a tomato?
June 28th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Forlourned:
Mavelman was published here as Miracle Man, at least the run by Alan Moore. I believe that some of Neil Gaiman’s run was published, too, but not all of it.
June 29th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
so kyle finds meaning in a movie that is meaningless. a movie that due to bad previews had to be recut and about 30 minutes of crap trimmed off. like the scene where hancock is having sex with a teen admirirer and he blows her through the roof of his mobile home with a mighty blast of semen…a really bad superman joke from some other comic…kyle, how in the world did you get a gig as a movie reviewer?
June 30th, 2008 at 12:17 am
this review is stupid, the usa is an alright place but you guys are nowhere near as free as you’d like to think, you must be on the dole cos there’s no way you make any money out of being a critic!
June 30th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Too bad Hancock is a movie and the Iraq war is real along with its collateral damage. I’m sure all those Iraqi children missing limbs in some cases and scarred with third degree burns in others from Hancock or Don Rumsfeld “overreacting” or “not always leaving things better than the way they found them” wouldnt take things as lightly as all that. Frankly Kyle you are an idiot. A neocon stooge of the highest order and undeserving to write film reviews or anything else. In fact your whole review makes me want to puke.
June 30th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
To Forlourned:
You’d destroy Cuba just for fun? What possible justification could you have for wrecking a country that has been screwed over by America for decades, for no reason? Cuba loans out doctors because their economy is shot and they can’t give out money - hell, the offered to send Doctors to help with 9/11 and Katrina, but the US State Department rejected their offers.
To answer your question: If I woke up drunk, homeless, memoryless and ultra-powerful, I’d take Bush and his cronies to Hiroshima, to visit the Peace Memorial and A-bomb Museum. If they didn’t get it, I’d drop them off in Southern Iraq, take control of the world, and dictate who’d be running evil America.
Of course, with no memory of who you are, why would you do anything that you’d want to do? How would you know to do what you thought you’d do with all that power?
June 30th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
This is the second time I read your one of your reviews.
Really? That’s what you got out of this movie?
Must be easy for you to type. No real consequences I guess.
Hope you have a successful career. At least it’ll be better than some of the real men in this world.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Wow, some crazy fringe responses here..
To Forlourned, what part about being super powerful and having no responsibilities makes you think that someone would need “justification” for taking out Cuba?
YouLOVEDIT doesn’t really seem to know what an allegory is.
I agree with Kyle’s take on the movie. Knowing a bit about the source material makes it all that more evident that this was how it was supposed to be interpreted by many.
January 24th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
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