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Blockbuster review: Hancock

In a world where directors of even the shallowest, most popcorn-munching summer action flick feel obliged to keep you in the cinema for at least two bladder-testing hours, Will Smith's new superhero  comedy Hancock is a breath of fresh air. It clocks in at a tight, unpretentious 90 minutes. It feels like longer though – in a good way. The expected ‘drunken superhero in Miles Davis sunnies gets a makeover’ arc is wrapped up in the first hour, giving way to a darker second section in which the invulnerable, almost immortal protagonist gets a taste of what it means to be truly human.

Indeed, the movie only really returns to its early light action comedy tone with the now-obligatory post-credits skit, in which the costume-designers own up to having plagiarised their own Wolverine costume.

The movie achieves its  refreshing brevity by dispensing with the usual origin sequence, delivering the hero to us as an already washed-up, but still eminently likeable force of nature. We get an insight into the hero’s background later in the film as it’s revealed that he’s part of a lost race of supermen who were once revered as gods but who died out because of one fatal flaw. Their power is diminished whenever they come close to one of their own kind. It’s a good thing that Hancock is all alone in the world. Or is he?

It’s worth noting that the movie’s title makes a lot more sense in the US, where John Hancock’s ebullient penmanship on the declaration of independence gives rise to the expression ‘John Hancock’ meaning signature. We’re more likely to think of Anthony Aloysius Hancock, and whereas the movie has, especially in its opening section, some very funny moments it’s got nothing to do with Blood Donors or Radio Hams.

It may not be one of the Big Three superhero movies this summer, but Hancock shouldn’t be overlooked. Despite its slightly uneven tone it has great action, great comedy, and even (unusually for a movie of its kind) some actual acting.

Best of all, it’ll only cost you an hour and a half. With England out of Euro 2008, it’s the best ninety minutes of the Summer.

Iron Man: First UK review

If you’re impatient and don’t have the time to read my whole review, here are the bullet points:

 

It’s great.

 

It’s the ultimate geek movie: Extraordinary computer aided design skills trump brute strength, and there's (almost) no romantic sub-plot.

 

There are two bona-fide ‘Indiana Jones vs Cocky Swordsman’ moments.

 

There is NO Nick Fury cameo*.

 

There isn’t QUITE ENOUGH Black Sabbath.

 

It’s notable that the name Iron Man is only used once in the movie, right at the very end and the name of his rival, Ironmonger, is only mentioned once in a throwaway comment. There’s also the subtlest of hints that we might see the ‘other’ Iron Man, War Machine, in the inevitable sequel.

 

'That guy that sneaked onto the set' didn't make the final cut.

Continue reading for the full Iron Man review, which will inevitably contain some plot spoilers.

How can we make 'The day the Earth stood still' more predictable?

Keanu Reeves, star of the forthcoming Day the Earth stood Still rehash, let slip a few plot points in his interview with MTV last week.

In the original fifties classic, Klaatu was dispatched to Earth by a galactic council to warn humanity that the disparity between the capability of their weaponry and their maturity as a species could lead to their annihilation.

It's a sensible  basis for a sci-fi movie, and one which would bear  remaking. Instead, however, the eloquent Mr Reeves (who also assures us that Gort, the iconic robot in the 1951 movie was 'iconoclastic') lets slip that we are being warned this time about Global Warming. Because that's what everyone's talking about.

Which of course is patently ridiculous. A superior pan-galactic civilisation wouldn't concern itself with a race that was burning itself out through its own stupidity. The premise of the Michael Rennie / Patricia Neal movie was that mankind represented a danger to other civilisations and that's why we were being warned.

If we just represent a danger to ourselves it's hard to see why anyone else should care.

Still looking forward to seeing the robot though.

Does Hollywood want to be Bollywood?

This tremendous snippet from our Bollywood expert Anil Sinanan:

Is Hollywood copying Bollywood? This week’s release 10,000 BC features a plot which is pure Bolly-corn: a lost father, a wise old lady, a scantily-clad heroine captured by the evil villain, a hunky hero who rescues her, elephants and a laughable digitally enhanced sabre-toothed telepathic tiger. Bring on the songs!

Personally, I think much of the critical drubbing of 10,000 BC has been unfair. There's no more point expecting geographical or palaeontological accuracy of 10,000 BC than Lord of the Rings. And besides, if you were to believe that Graham Hancock is right (and I don't suggest that you do) there could have been just about every element of the story co-existing on the continent of Antarctica around 12,000 years ago.

If it's a history lesson you want maybe the cinema's the wrong place to find it. I do eel as if the film could have done with a few more explosions though.

Speed Racer: What on earth is it about?

For a UK audience, Speed Racer is something of an enigma. Based on a Japanese cartoon series that later became very popular in the US it’s the source of much fanboy excitement on the other side of the pond while being met with mild bemusement here.

So why should UK moviegoers care about it?

Well, for a start it’s written and directed by Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski, and no matter what your reservations may have have been about the somewhat wayward plotting of the two followups they were still visually very arresting movies and taken as a standalone story the first Matrix movie remains an elegantly crafted and beautifully shot cyberpunk masterpiece.

The Wachowskis haven’t tried too hard to imbue the original cartoon’s structure with any bolted-on deep meaning, leaving a streamlined hot-rod of a plotline that lends itself to the most insanely exuberant visual experience of any movie to date. See stills gallery below the jump or watch the trailer below to see what we mean.

 

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Justice League: Still on?

Some news from an unexpected quarter this weekend as MTV’s movie blog quotes rap star/actor Common as saying that he has agreed to play the Green Lantern in George Miller’s 2010 Justice League of America project. It’s by no means poor casting, and the John Stewart character is for most young JLA fans the default Green Lantern, if only because producers of the animated series have seized upon the opportunity to field a more ethnically diverse League then the original, rather monocultural team.

The Top 10 modern sci-fi movie clichés

Discovering the excellent trailer for Doomsday this week got me thinking how modular many modern movies are: How you can take Ultraviolet and Equilibrium and Resident Evil and Doom and a hundred other thoroughly enjoyable actioners and edit them together in virtually infinite combinations which would all work equally well. There’s no reason why Blockbuster Buzz readers shouldn’t profit by this – just glue together some of the following story and casting elements with the right degree of élan and you should have a green light by tomorrow teatime: 

Why Blockbuster movies are an endangered species, and why it’s all Steve Jobs’ fault.

Why should you care about blockbusters? Because they’re an endangered species. High quality video camcorders and video editing software are increasingly affordable and the latest technology is surprisingly easy to master. As long as you want to make Lost in Translation, the future’s bright. Unfortunately the huge casts and exotic special effects that typify the modern blockbuster are well outside the compass of the desktop auteur and look likely to remain so for quite some little while yet.

Even when all-CGI casts become a realistic option for lower-budget filmmakers they’re unlikely to return us to a golden age of blockbuster silliness: A big old-fashioned blockbuster like The Ten Commandments has, for me at least, an entirely different emotional resonance to a movie with synthespian crowds like – to pick one example – The Phantom Menace.

I really enjoyed Zemeckis’ Beowulf, but notwithstanding the tremendous voice acting performances by the stellar cast, and the evident love and craft poured into the animation there are some scenes that look more like a Playstation cut scene than like a real event. That’s not because Robert Zemeckis was parsimonious with the budget, it’s because he was pushing up against the limits of what the current technology can achieve.

Of the Top 20 most expensive productions ever, even adjusting for inflation, only one was not made in the last decade. Further, a successful franchise brings its own penalties: Twentieth Century Fox spent about $75 million to produce the first X-Men movie in 2000. By contrast the final instalment in the trilogy X-Men: The Last Stand, with inflated star salaries driven by the success of its predecessors, cost $210 million to make.

Box office receipts are still buoyant, but the same can’t be said of income from DVDs and the download market. As high-speed broadband penetration gets ever deeper in the US and the UK illegal downloads will inevitably increase, shaving ‘long tail’ revenues more and more.

Studios like to collect money, not to spend it, but even before the final resolution of the writers’ strike margins on grander productions are slimming alarmingly. If the money stops pouring in then the first casualty will be not the talky little art-house movie that anyone can make with a camcorder, it’s the huge epic where stunts outweigh scripts.

If you love films where superheroes crash cars and spaceships blow up while surrounded by a vast crowd of live toga-clad extras, there may not be much time left. We’re going to tell you about as many big silly noisy movies as we can in these twilight years of the blockbuster. Join us in the cheap seats.

Michael Moran