Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
2008, for better or for worse, will be remembered as the year the superhero genre on film proved its longevity and its elasticity, and I think next year’s arrival of WATCHMEN has the potential to be perfectly timed.
If it works. No pressure, Zack.
This year’s seen more variations on the formula than any other in recent memory, all of them competing for this summer’s box-office dollars. IRON MAN. HULK. Both important building blocks for the new Marvel Studios. Both rigidly formal interpretations. Both very Marvel. And now, two attempts at pop deconstruction, one an adaptation, one a movie-star vehicle original. Both will have passionate and vocal defenders. Both of them missing, for my tastes, in the same way.
I’m not of the opinion that a movie has to be high art to have value. There’s plenty of low culture that hits my sweet spot. No such thing as a guilty pleasure, in my opinion; either a film works for you or it doesn’t. It’s a binary process. Although I’d recommend you see both films if you have any interest in the genre, I can’t honestly say I think either of them is built to last. Maybe that makes them true to form; when I was a kid in the ‘70s, my friends and I didn’t collect comics. That’s not to say we didn’t buy a lot of them... it’s just that we didn’t think of them as things to collect. They were meant to be read. And that’s what we did. We read them. We traded them. Sometimes they got lost under beds or in the backs of closets or older brothers would confiscate them, and that was fine. We’d already soaked them up, added them to our ever-expanding understanding of Spidey or Man-Thing or Batman or Superman or any of the two-dozen other titles I read. The sheer volume of comics I gathered made them hard to move, and we moved often, so I would shed the books I’d accumulate. Comics in my life were, by necessity, disposable. Maybe that’s why I feel no particular reverence to source material when it comes to comics. I think as long as you understand the conventions of what you’re doing, you can feel free to bend or even break them as you need to.
Ongoing series, in particular, tell their stories in a very particular codified way, and once you read enough of them, you get it. There’s an innate grasp of the conventions that should kick in. But just understanding those conventions isn’t enough. You need to have something to say if you’re going to be a deconstructionist. It’s not enough at this point, after enough great minds have been at it, to say, “Hey, what if a superhero is an asshole and a drunk?” That’s not a new idea. It doesn’t expand or illuminate in a new way. There is a reason why I’m a comic reader, not a comic writer. That’s a very particular skill set, and the guys who do it well... the Moores or the Gaimans or the Busieks or the Bendiseses... er, the Bendii... they speak comics like a language. They’re fluent in it. They soaked it up the way other people soaked up film or music or art or photography or sports or whatever. When they descontruct comics and the conventions of the genre, they do it with authority.
Now, after the last seven or eight years, after all the X-MEN and FANTASTIC FOUR and SPIDER-MAN and DAREDEVIL and HULK and SUPERMAN RETURNS and BLADE and GHOST RIDER and ELEKTRA and HELLBOY and BATMAN we’ve had onscreen, the audience is ready. The pump is primed. It’s time to get post-modern. When something like MYSTERY MEN tried it earlier, it was still too soon. Fanboys may complain about all the origin stories they’ve seen in the past decade, but there’s a reason for that. Every comic book has an issue one, and for film audiences, you have to do the same thing. And until a mass audience sees several of them, and sees the way each superhero is similar or the ways they’re different, you can’t get post-modern. You can’t play with expectations until you establish those expectations. That takes time, and a certain degree of saturation.
Mark Millar has certainly made an impression on the comic industry over the last few years, and it doesn’t surprise me to hear that he’s one of the many people pitching on a new SUPERMAN movie at Warner Bros. If WANTED has a big opening weekend, that may well raise his stock with Warner. Strange, since the film is really not the same sort of deconstructionist fare that Millar wrote. It’s more of a reaction to the past decade of action cinema, with a sort of perfunctory nod at some superhero tropes as window dressing.
I wish I could say I liked the film. I liked images in the film. I liked some of the energy of the movie. Timur Bekmambetov is absolutely capable of summoning visual thunder at times. And having said all of that, I’m still not convinced it’s much of a movie at all. I find the first third of the film almost grotesquely difficult to watch because of just how overt the theft from THE MATRIX and FIGHT CLUB is. Did you like those movies? Yeah? Well, so did Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, evidently. There are some nice moments in that first act, like the scene with Mr. X, played by the extra-freaky David O’Hara, but the crippling familiarity is pretty hard to sit through. Once James McAvoy is done with his training montages, then we have... well, mission montages. In fact, the whole film feels like a montage. Is that where we’ve gotten with action cinema at this point? Bekmambetov seems entirely unconcerned with the connective tissue that makes a film work. He loves the sensation, the noise, the blood spatter. This is the film that some people accused 300 of being, where style supplants substance completely.
Write to theme. That’s what I was taught. That’s what I believe. Even in the broadest of action films or the silliest of comedies, if you write to your basic theme, you’ll give your film some semblance of coherence. Both THE MATRIX and FIGHT CLUB worked because of how powerfully they dramatized their heavy thematic material. WANTED isn’t “about” a goddamn thing, and if that’s okay with you... if you really don’t care if there’s even a pretense of soul or heart or brains... if it’s all just empty surface and you’re fine with a 100 minute car commercial. With NIGHT WATCH, DAY WATCH, and now this film, we’ve seen that Bekmambetov can create a startling or beautiful image. He can even string them together. But I don’t believe the guy’s a fully-formed storyteller yet, because he has yet to tell me a story in a way that holds together in even the most fundamental of ways. Narrative just ain’t his bag. If anyone comes close to making this film feel like it’s got a pulse, it’s Jolie. She sells her wee bit of backstory, makes you feel like it’s credible and there’s some genuine sadness going on, and for me, it really clicks in a wry little smile she gives just before pulling the trigger for the last time in the film. I don’t think the film works, but I think a performance like hers is enough to convince you that it does. Morgan Freeman gets a big laugh with his Sam Jackson moment, but we’ve seen this sort of work from him a dozen times before.
This isn’t a franchise. Please don’t try to make this a franchise. The worst thing that could happen would be for them to start cranking out WANTED films. I don’t buy the organization of the Weavers for a minute. Harry talks at length about “suspension of disbelief” in his review; no shit. But if there’s no internal logic or if something’s just haphazardly constructed, it loses me. If the writers and director couldn’t be bothered to really make this world feel complete, then why should I be required to take anything in it seriously? It’s all just breaking the rules of reality with no weight or consequence, and to no end. Nothing anyone does in this film has any bearing on the fate of the world. Nothing is accomplished. It’s not a terrible movie, and it’s not the most violent or mean-spirited film of all time. It’s not worthy of hyperbole to any degree. It’s just another case of Teflon Hollywood, nothing that sticks, nothing worth remembering afterwards. I need more than just the pretty pictures. I’ll take the genuine spark of storytelling on a nothing budget over this hollow “thrill ride” any day.
HANCOCK has some of the same problems that WANTED does. It’s not about anything. It’s a series of incidents, and then it’s over, and nothing is truly accomplished. The film’s “big villain,” such as it is, is a total wash-out, a threat for no reason other than to stage a preposterous “emotional” climax. This film’s “twists,” which some people are going crazy trying to preserve, are surprising only if you’ve never seen a motion picture in your entire life. Peter Berg telegraphs pretty much the entire film, tipping his hand repeatedly in the way he stages things. You’re not supposed to be surprised, I don’t think. There’s a character in the film harboring a secret, but from the moment that character shows up, they might as well be wearing it written on a t-shirt. It’s that transparently obvious. Overall, this is a great example of the sort of comic book writing that really started to emerge in the late ‘80s, when young punks were tearing down the industry by holding up a few brilliant mirrors to it. Miller’s work on THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS was like a bomb going off. The idea of dirtying up an icon like that was so unheard of, so impossible to imagine. Warner Bros. protected those characters carefully, just like Marvel did. It is one of the great miracles of comics that DC let him tear down the Batman to his exposed id.
If HANCOCK had been a comic series in the late ‘80s, we’d be talking about it still. “Wow, did you see how they reconstructed the notion of the lonely god, a la SUPERMAN, by making him an alcoholic angry asshole who destroys more than he helps? So smart.” And there is something provocative in seeing some of Hancock’s worst instincts play out on film. A super-powered asshole is terrifying because it’s hard enough dealing with a regularly-powered asshole. If HANCOCK works for you, chances are Will Smith’s performance will be one of the things that does it. He continues to prove why he is one of our last reliable movie stars here, giving a grounded, watery-eyed performance that makes you believe in the absurdities of the film. Smith believes everything he’s doing, so the audience goes along with him. The film’s at its best early on, when Hancock’s origin is still a mystery and he’s basically just an anti-social force of nature, a property damage machine with a taste for whiskey. The script by Vince Gilligan and Vincent Ngo, loosely based on Ngo’s original spec TONIGHT HE COMES, is a shaggy dog story. It’s not quite sure what story it’s telling, so it tries to tell a half-dozen different ones at the same time. Like WANTED, HANCOCK stumbles when it comes to subtext, as in... there is none. Again, I’m not sure how you put together an entire film like this without anyone figuring out what it is that the film’s about, but HANCOCK manages to exist only as surface, resolutely refusing to go any deeper. There are opportunities here to comment on the way we are drawn to destructive relationships, or the ways we sabotage ourselves, or the ways expectation can cripple us, but none of that is dealt with in any significant way. Instead, we get Will Smith shoving people’s heads up their asses and a strange sort of lift from BACK TO THE FUTURE 2, with Hancock literally unable to walk away from someone calling him an “asshole.”
I think Peter Berg is somehow both overrated and underappreciated at the same time. He’s got some real muscle as a filmmaker, and when he focuses it the right way, I think he’s capable of some very good work, like FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS or parts of THE KINGDOM. But there’s also a slapdash quality to much of his work, like he can get a movie close, but sometimes they just get away from him. HANCOCK definitely suffers from that. I know how long this thing’s been in development, and how many versions they’ve written. But... this wasn’t the one to shoot. Not quite.
The basic problem is this: they try to create a larger mythology, one that we need to take seriously for the end of the film to carry any payoff at all. But the mythology they create is so poorly explained and so poorly explored by the writers that it feels like they’ve chickened out on any sort of deconstructionist urge and right at the end, they want us to see this as a real superhero film, one that plays by the same rules rather than shattering them. And if this is “just another origin story,” and that’s all there is to it in the end, then I have to call it a wash. There’s nothing inherently interesting about Hancock as a character, nothing that’s going to make me come back for another adventure later. “But it’s not that kind of film. This is a comment ON those films.” Nope. No, it’s not. I can tell that it wants to be, but there’s not a single comment that it makes that hasn’t been made before and better, and considering how many giants have already stepped up to take a shot at this sort of thing, you either have to do something new, do something better than anyone else, or just decide to tell a great story well. HANCOCK does none of those.
In the end, both of these films are worth at least a look. Neither one is devoid of charms or merit. But they are films that we’ll remember as second-tier at best, movies we’ll have a hard time remembering beyond one or two key images later this year. Maybe that’s all you want from your summer movies, in which case these might fit the bill perfectly. But if you think this genre deserves some smart post-modernism as we reach this particular saturation point, then these two movies will both disappoint and frustrate you to some extent.
Sometime next week, I’m going to have a report on two scripts for upcoming projects that aim for this same territory and that may be more successful in their attempts. Oddly, one even involves Millar. For now, though, let’s get cracking on that WALL-E review. I’ve been itching to write about it since the first time I saw it, and I’m eager to hear what you guys think now that you can see it for yourselves.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
