John Hancock, to be precise. But this isn’t about a famed signer of the Declaration of Independence, not at all. It’s about a drunken lout who lives in a cluttered, tiny trailer in the middle of the desert, but prefers to sleep on park benches with large bottles of whiskey close at hand. He also happens to have super-powers. But those don’t win him an adoring public, like you might expect. In the first three minutes of the movie, he gets called the same insulting thing three times, which quickly becomes the running joke of the film. I can’t say it here, because I’m pretty sure it’s beyond PG-13, but the point is, this isn’t anything like Superman… unless you’ve always suspected that Superman flies drunk once in a while.
One thing I’ve always wondered about with Superman and other super-strong types is how they get the leverage to do some of these things, because no matter how strong you are, you can’t just lift a building with your two hands. They’re a little more realistic about that here (realistic being a very relative term, of course). It’s got more an Unbreakable vibe than an X-Men feel, let’s put it that way. So while flipping around cars is no big deal (see below) they don’t have him lifting up battleships with one hand, either. There’s just the whale incident that’s really comic-book-ish.
But the point is, though he stops a freeway chase involving half the LA police and men with automatic weapons (good) he also causes more than nine million dollars in collateral damage (bad). He rarely accidentally kills anyone, it seems, but it isn’t from lack of trying, because once he wades in, he doesn’t stop to think about where the sharp pieces of metal are flying.
Enter Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman — I have a vague recollection of him as one of the kids on the old Valerie TV show, which I never watched, and he’s on that Arrested Development show, too, which you couldn’t pay me enough to watch). He’s a PR consultant. I always wondered how PR consultants made money, and this doesn’t clear that question up at all. He seems to spend his days trying to convince large corporations to be charitable — an admirable goal, but I don’t see how it gets him paid, since he doesn’t seem to be one of the charities.

Able to flip trapped sedans with a single hand.

But he rebuilds images for a living, and boy, does Hancock’s image need rebuilding. When Ray is caught in a traffic jam and nearly run over by a train, Hancock saves his life. He also wrecks Ray’s car and several other nearby, not to mention what happens when he stops the train… because he just stops the train, cold, and with dozens of cars attached to that engine, also moving along quickly… well, you can imagine.
Ray stops a near-riot, and makes a point of thanking Hancock, and an uneasy alliance is born. Promising to make everyone adore and respect him, Ray has Hancock surrender himself to the police in response to the dozens of warrants issued against him over the years. That, basically, is Movie 1.
Movie 2 involves Ray’s family more; namely his adorable little boy, Aaron (Jae Head), who already adores Hancock, and his blond suburban wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), who is about as thrilled as one might imagine to have LA’s bad boy hanging around with her husband and ruining the road in front of her suburban house with his wild takeoffs and landings.
Movie 1 is sort of a typical comic-book style movie, really. Hancock has to face lots of men whom he put in jail, while in jail, which goes about as one might expect. Actually, it’s probably much weirder than you’d expect, but it certainly isn’t good. Movie 2 is… different, and I’m unsure of how to describe it without giving too much away. (If you don’t care about that, see the brand-new, never-before-attempted-by-me spoiler section below.) It’s more supernatural, more thoughtful, delving into Hancock’s past, which is of course tragic, but not in the way I was thinking. Anyway, the two movies collide dramatically at the end, though Movie 1 kind of gets run over by the more epic Movie 2.
So now I’m not sure what to rate this. I liked both halves of the film, but it was a little uneasy watching them try to fit together. But Will Smith can save nearly any script, apparently. He’s some kind of good luck charm, not to mention being a very good actor; and Charlize and Jason are right in there with him on his rescue mission. We’ll go with three and a quarter idols, one idol for each main character and a quarter just because it’s a superhero movie and I tend to like those. You know, unless it’s The Mask, because I liked that comic and they ruined it for the screen.
Basically, it’s a fun watch, but be prepared to be pulled in several different directions, and never quite sure what kind of film this is. If you can deal with that, though, it’s a good, intriguing summer flick, with good effects, good dialogue, and even a scantily-clad Will. What more could you want?
SPOILER:
Okay, if I’ve done this right, selecting the text below should let you read it. In case I’ve done something that won’t work on all computers (I’m a movie critic, not a programmer), the following blank space should hopefully let you veer away before you see anything you don’t want to see. Normally I won’t do this, but this time I have a fun little theory about what’s going on that I wanted to share.

If you’ve seen the film, you know that there’s a strong eagle motif for Will’s character — his hat has an eagle, he wears an eagle necklace, and has a pet eagle at the end, besides the eagle on his super-suit. Take that, plus the fact that he and Mary have supposedly known each other and been in both love and hate for centuries, maybe millennia, my theory is that they’re actually supposed to be Zeus and Hera. Zeus’ symbol was the eagle, and he and Hera were always fighting. They were once part of a group of others like then, now dead, and Mary claims they were all made to be paired off, like most gods in the Greek pantheon. She also at one point tries to convince Hancock that they’re actually brother and sister instead of husband and wife, which Zeus and Hera were, both children of Cronus and Rhea. She also says that they were once called gods, before they were called superheroes. And when she gets angry, she gets ANGRY, which is very Hera-like, and actually very unlike her Mary persona. So my take, for what it’s worth.
/END SPOILER

“Missed it by that much.” That was about all I knew about the Get Smart TV show, just that catch phrase and the shoe phone, really. I think once, long ago, I saw the episode where Max and 99 get married, because I vaguely remember being puzzled over how someone could get married and not even say their real name. I researched it before I went, but I’m sure I missed a ton of in-jokes. For instance, the current Max (Steve Carell) had a wanted poster up on his refrigerator for Dr. Loveless from Wild, Wild West (I’ve seen every episode of that); but it turns out he also played a bad guy on the Get Smart series named Mr. Big. So there were probably a lot more references that just slid right past me. But that’s okay, because you don’t have to catch every one.
Supposedly, CONTROL (not an acronym, apparently, though you’re supposed to capitalize it) was disbanded after the Cold War ended and their arch-enemies, KAOS (ditto) went away. Except neither is true; both groups just went underground, literally. Max says something about being sixteen stories underground at one point. I don’t know how the original plot went, but in the film, Max isn’t an agent, but rather an intelligence analyst. Insert obvious joke here. Still, he’s very good at his job, and the Chief (Alan Arkin, and don’t forget to watch him in Catch-22) thinks that the world needs the old-fashioned type of agent, like the two of them are. So as much as Max wants that promotion to field agent, he isn’t getting it, even though he passed all his exams. Frankly, I was just glad that they didn’t make him into a total idiot, because I don’t think I could have tolerated that for almost two hours.
Early on, CONTROL headquarters is broken into, and KAOS grabs a complete list of all CONTROL field agents. But they have a secret weapon in the form of Agent 99 (Anne Hathway, not looking at all Princess Diaries-ish), who has recently had extensive plastic surgery and therefore won’t be recognized; and also (you guessed it) in their newest operative, Max, now Agent 86. Their super agent, the guy who gets applauded whenever he walks in the room, Agent 23 (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), is forced to stay at the base and learn how to work the copy machine, while 99 and the untested Max go off to save the world.
KAOS has been making bombs (‘nucular’ ones; James Caan has great fun playing a president who no one ever quite comes out and says is George W., but we all know) and our heroes have to track the factory down, with 99 reluctant all the while and Max almost ridiculously enthusiastic yet deathly serious. They have great little gadget fights. (“Exploding dental floss. You don’t have this? Huh.”) She harps on his inexperience, he chides her for wanting to hit everything, and you sometimes wonder why the whole world doesn’t know that they’re undercover agents, the way they argue in public. But they muddle through (of course) and find the factory, and you think the movie’s over for a second. Then everything goes wrong again, and the good guys have to start all over.

99 prepares to fire, and Max prepares to show off his skills at a made-up martial art.

I was expecting tons of physical humor, and while there certainly is that (such as the obligatory ‘maneuver around the security lasers crisscrossing the room’ scene), it isn’t just that, thankfully. There’s a scene involving a miniature crossbow and tiny darts that absolutely made me cringe, though I have to admit that the rest of the audience seemed to like it. Go figure. But surprisingly, it’s kind of a feel-good movie, in its way — the once overweight Max goes out of his way to make the chubby girl feel like the belle of the ball; and the Chief, after being called ‘gramps’ repeatedly, gets to beat up on a younger guy. So everyone gets to be a hero in his or her own way — except the bad guys, of course.
They’re led by the mysterious and nasty Siegfried (Terence Stamp), who is in turn led by the voice of the Unknown Caller on the phone. The sidekick angle is covered by Ken Davitian as the unheard voice of pseudo-reason, Shtarker, and muscle is provided by the Easter Island man, as Max christens him — really Dalip Singh, also known as the Great Khali to any wrestling fans out there. I had to look him up on imdb.com — he’s actually 7’2″ and weighs almost 400 pounds. So, yeah, Max and 99 get nearly flattened by him. He could flatten people just by looking at them funny, really.
Three and one-eighth idols here, and I never thought I’d be rating it that high. I did subtract one-eighth for that awful pincushion scene, but really it was pretty fun overall. You can see Masi Oka of Heroes fame as a tech, Bruce, and one of Max’s buddies; witness the upgraded version of the TV series’ Cone of Silence; and learn what can be done with one of those banners that they trail behind light planes. You’ll also see the Disney Hall in LA, which looks like a large heap of slightly melted aluminum sheets, and is a singularly ugly building. But don’t forget to pay attention to the man in the tree.

The previews made kind of a big deal of the fact that this was M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated film. That was actually a surprise, but it seems it’s true. And you can tell that you’re watching an R-rated movie within the first five minutes, I think — I’m not positive of the exact criteria, but I’m pretty sure the way that girl in the park dies is no longer PG-13.
But this is a hard film to review. Not because I can’t make up my mind about it or don’t know what to say, but because I’m trying so hard not to give anything away. The twist isn’t much of a twist, but still. And I’m still mad at that movie rental chain that gave away the ending for The Sixth Sense, and I don’t need to attract that kind of bad karma. So I have a fine line to walk here, but I’ll do my best.
Mark Wahlberg plays science teacher Elliot Moore, who of course teaches in Philadelphia, because M. Night sets all his movies there. His wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel, who I really only know as Emily’s sister) is just… weird. She walks around with those huge blue eyes and pale face and absolutely no expression beyond vague concern for a good part of the film, and though she keeps insisting that she just doesn’t like to share her feelings, I think that’s just to cover up the fact that she has no sense of humor whatsoever. Absolutely zero. Elliot’s best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) doesn’t like her, and I don’t think I blame him. But she’s kind of a nonentity anyway, so you don’t really need to worry about her.
The happening of the title is the fact that people are, out of the blue, committing suicide in various gruesome ways, starting in New York’s Central Park and radiating out. (See, I told you that Central Park is still dangerous!) And this is seriously gruesome. They may even have topped the whole helicopter blade trend that’s been bothering me, but I’m not sure. When I saw that particular gruesome death coming, I covered my eyes.
The twist, such as it is, comes from what’s causing this. Apparently something is making the brain’s safeguards against self-harm break down, but theories about that something range from divine intervention to some weird nuclear leak. The part I can’t figure out is why that makes people so actively kill themselves. It seems to me that shutting down those neurochemicals or whatever would just make you take foolish chances, like crossing the highway without looking. Here, they apparently can’t even bear to wait to find less hideously painful ways to die.

The brooding scientist, the traumatized little girl, and the scarily disconnected wife wait for the plot twist.

Anyway, best friend Julian has a little girl, Jess, and since Julian isn’t the main character, the main character soon ends up taking care of said little girl. Fleeing the cities, even the smaller towns soon become unsafe, and with a rapidly-dwindling group, Elliot, Alma, and Jess head out into the wilds of Pennsylvania. They meet maniacs who barricade their houses against nerve toxins (I always wonder if that would really work); a private separated from all his superiors and wandering around trying to act like he knows what to do; and even a little old crazy lady (Betty Buckley) who has no electricity and doesn’t even know what’s been going on. She’s also completely forgotten how to interact with other humans.
And… overall, it really wasn’t very good. I love M. Night, really, but he just can’t seem to hit the high notes of Unbreakable or The Village anymore. I’m not sure what’s wrong, but I went to this film with high hopes, and it just didn’t work out. People have blamed bad casting, which could be part of the problem, but I know it isn’t just that. Something’s not clicking anymore, and it’s really a shame.
So two and three-quarter idols — one for the whole atmosphere of the film, which is very much up to his usual standards; one just because M. Night is M. Night, and three quarters because they actually leave the Philadelphia city limits for most of the movie. Otherwise, the only good thing I really got from this movie was another reason for me to dislike crowds.

But yeah… a lot of horror. It was what I was working on this week.
Also made a fanfare for brass, though! That’s not horror!
The Rule
And here’s a simple request for the now classic style of piano music for horror films…
Classic Horror 1, 2, and 3
Finally, I did… quite a bit for “The Weakness: Episode 4”
Long Note 4, Ritual, Dark Walk, Unnatural Situation all come from that.
Ritual is a particularly nice piece. Super moody.