Hancock: big jerk, bigger mess

By David W. Shelton | July 3, 2008 |

In a summer where superheroes clearly have staked their territory, Hancock makes the biggest mess of all of them. The weird thing about this mess is that it’s what the film intended. Part superhero movie, part whacked-out theology, and part jerk-gets-redeemed story, Hancock has so many irons in the fire that the audience just doesn’t know what the hell is going on.

Director Peter Berg turns in a celluloid train wreck that’s filled with the overuse of the gutter version of “anus” to such an extent that it becomes a one-joke film. Okay, we get it. John Hancock (Will Smith) is a jerk. He’s the king of potholes, dodging airplanes, and sloshing around with a big bottle of booze. He’s homeless, and hates the world around him. Now, I don’t know if he’s a jerk because of these things, or that being a jerk led him to being  homeless, but frankly, I wasn’t really compelled to care.

I don’t know what it is about today’s filmmakers that feel the necessity to drive in the obvious (that Hancock is a jerk) to the point where even a headache would be a relief. The fact that the first time we hear the word is from a small child is supposed to be funny, but again, it’s stating the obvious. «Read the rest of this article»

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“Wanted” promises action; delivers

By David W. Shelton | July 3, 2008 |

Wanted, the new action film from Universal Pictures, is a crowd-pleasing action film that’s sure to keep the adrenaline pumped in audiences everywhere. Before I continue with this review, perhaps I should confess my own secret love for underdog-turned-badass movies since there’s that twelve-year-old in me that will never grow up.

Films like Wanted appeal to just that kid-on-the-cusp-of-adulthood mentality that most adult men share, driving all of us to wonder just what we’ve done with our lives. Since most of us who shell out our eight bucks to see this kind of movie aren’t interested in anything but violence, guts, sex, and profanity, director Timur Bekmambetov (with his first American film) delivers all of these elements within the first five minutes of the narrative.

That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, really. Bekmambetov’s style is clearly an attempt to capture the equally-adult comic book in film, a task which is largely successful. Having never read the comic (I know, they’re supposed to be called “graphic novels,” but frankly, I don’t care. They’re comics.), I was able to look at the film as its own entity. Since the vast majority of the film’s audience is equally ignorant of its source material, that’s probably a good thing.

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