I caught Hancock at the $2 movie in Woodbridge last week. ($1.50 matinee actually.) That was about the right price. There were seeds of a couple of really interesting movies here. One you saw in previews: polishing the obnoxious superhero for modern media. The other story–well, I won’t spoil it for you.
Unfortunately there really wasn’t time to do both stories in 90 minutes or so. This story might have been better done as a TV series (Heroes?). But what really killed it in the end was a cliché that has lost all force.
In fact, the cliché has become so common and so predictable that I can’t imagine that I’m spoiling anything for you by telling you that two of the main characters die at the end. And then magically wake up 30 seconds later. I mean, how many times have we seen this? Are movie directors so desperate that they can’t think of a better climax? And it’s not like movie goers over the age of twelve are at all surprised or moved but this trick any more. I think the last time it actually worked may have been E.T. over 20 years ago. Can’t we just quit?
These days, if a movie wanted to do something really shocking, it would leave the characters dead. But maybe Hollywood thinks we’re all such whiny crybabies they can’t get away with anything less than a happy ending. It’s not just Hollywood either. CJ7 was completely spoiled by a last-minute back from the dead scene that even Spielberg would have been embarrassed by.
There’s a closely related cliché in which the villain pretends to be dead, and then comes back for one last swipe at the hero. This variant should have ended with Fatal Attraction in 1987. And then there’s the closely related, “The hero lets the villain live but the villain tries to shoot the hero in the back so the hero kills him instead.” That one should have been retired after Star Trek III.
I guess the more movies I see in my life, the more I come to realize that most directors and writers just aren’t that creative or original. The last really original movie I saw was, I think, Borat. Before that, maybe Winged Migration? There’ve been a few others here and there with good stories, but when’s the last time you saw a genuinely new idea come out of Hollywood? I know really new ideas are rare, but can’t we at least call for a moratorium on the worst of the old ideas?
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