/ 4 July 2008

Bearable lightness

MOVIES OF THE WEEK: Shaun de Waal reviews Will Smith's new film, <i>Hancock</i>, as well as <i> Get Smart</i>.

MOVIES OF THE WEEK: Shaun de Waal reviews Will Smith’s new film, Hancock and Get Smart

The new Will Smith vehicle, Hancock, apparently had a fairly bad reaction from preview audiences and thus underwent major reshoots. Behind-the-scenes site Ain’t It Cool also reports on some scenes that were cut from the original edit, including one in which Smith’s character, the superhero Hancock, has sex with a woman in his trailer and in the process causes her to be thrown many metres through the air, while he punches several holes in the ceiling with his ejaculation. Luckily for the woman in question, he obviously withdrew just in time.

The scenario sounds amusing, though Ain’t It Cool says it was one of the silliest scenes the reviewer had ever seen. What, you want serious? A credible superhero? No, we want to laugh. Another scene, in which a jailed Hancock shoves one inmate’s head up another’s arse, literally, was not cut; it’s still in the movie and it’s also rather silly. What that means is that silliness, per se, was not the filmmakers’ sole guide in determining what stayed and what got removed.

In fact the whole film is rather silly and the reshoots and other late rejigging probably contributed significantly to the confusions of its latter half, with various inconsistencies and nonsenses, plot holes unplugged and a general sense of disjointedness. That said, though, Hancock isn’t all bad. It is at least a commendable attempt to put a new (and humorous) spin on the old superhero clichés, and in that it often works surprisingly well. It’s the best thing Smith has done in a while, and I count both the post-apocalyptic I Am Legend, which had a weird deadness about it, and the painfully serious The Pursuit of Happyness. For all its flaws, or maybe because of them, Hancock has some life.

John Hancock is apparently the last superhero on Earth and it’s not a job he’s handling very well. This has something to do with amnesia about his origins, but either way he has descended into an alcoholic muddle and when he intervenes in some villainy-in-progress he tends to make an outrageous mess. The opening scenes of the film, in which this messiness is demonstrated, are both thrilling and amusing.

After such disasters, and with politicians, TV presenters and ordinary people baying for his blood, Hancock meets a man who offers to help him change his bad image. This is Ray (Jason Bateman), a no-hope do-gooder of a PR man, and while Ray’s kid (Jae Head) is impressed by this new association, his wife, Mary (Charlize Theron) is not. To explain the reasons for this would be to give away too much plot, though it must be said that it all pivots on a coincidence that is not satisfactorily explained.

At any rate, Hancock struggles manfully through the jerky second half of its running time and just about comes out as entertaining enough overall to deserve at least a conditional recommendation. It does try to blend comedy and action without making the former element entirely anally centred. The same can be said for Get Smart, which revamps an old TV show not a million miles from The Man from UNCLE in concept and execution.

Steve Carrell plays a secret agent only somewhat more competent an agent than Hancock is a superhero. He is Maxwell Smart and he works for CONTROL which, in the usual Manichaean struggle, is endlessly battling the forces of KAOS. In The Man from UNCLE, UNCLE stood for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, while its enemy THRUSH encoded Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity. In Get Smart both CONTROL and KAOS look like acronyms, but in fact do not stand for anything but themselves. This is practically cosmic — the only thing that would make it more cosmic would be if it were ORDER versus KAOS. Or perhaps that’s just a recipe for comedy.

After a nefarious attack on CONTROL headquarters, Smart (or, to give him his nom de guerre, Agent 86), is paired with Agent 99 and sent off to trace the villains and so forth. Agent 99 is not happy about this arrangement. She — for she is indeed a she — is played by the charming and pulchritudinous Anne Hathaway; it must have been hard to resist giving her the title Agent 69. Anyway, from there it’s the usual bickering mismatch that works itself out through the process of going on a mission together and fighting evil.

Get Smart is certainly amusing; 86 plus 99 equals at least 20 laughs. Carrell and Hathaway are sufficiently adept comedians to make good work of a decent script and the film passes by with barely a moment of dullness. It’s depthless, of course, but its lightness is efficiently maintained. The leads are well supported, too, by the likes of Dwayne (”The Rock”) Johnson, Alan Arkin, and Terence Stamp as a villain with the Wagnerian name Siegfried — not, alas, a singing role.