Hancock (2008)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

There are certain things that most superheroes have in common.  For starters, there's almost always a secret identity involved.  Superman has Clark Kent.  Spiderman goes about his non-hero business as Peter Parker.  Not so with Hancock.  Everyone knows him as such and he always uses the same identity.  He dresses in everyday clothing and has no alter ego.  He even goes through most of the movie without even thinking of a special costume.

His full name is John Hancock, an allusion to the most famous of signatures.  (The reference is explained in the movie.)  John is the most basic of heroes.  He doesn't seem to have use for social skills or manners.  When he arrives to help someone, he does what he has to do to save their lives, but doesn't seem to care what the consequences are.  This bothers many elected officials, public servants and common people.

To give you a good example, Ray Embry, played by Jason Bateman, enters the movie when Hancock saves him from an oncoming train.  Ray made the mistake of stopping on the track and not noticing said oncoming train because he was talking on the phone.  Instead of picking up the car and flying off, Hancock chooses to stop the train, thus derailing it.  Yes, Ray gets to live another day, but the railroad company is left to clean up a huge mess.

Everyone at the scene is upset with Hancock because this is just the latest in a string of messes he's made.  Ray, recognizing that Hancock saved his life, decides to repay him by trying to change his image.  Turns out, he's an advertising executive, so he knows a little about changing image.  Apparently, Ray likes a challenge.

Ray's wife doesn't think that the makeover will work.  Hancock is not only impolite, but he's a drunk and a rather mean one at that.  He lives in a trailer far removed from anyone else.  He seems to hate everyone for calling him what he is.  I don't know that he's necessarily a bad person.  It's just that, as I said earlier, he doesn't realize why it's important to be polite.  He knows that stopping a carjacking or a murder is the right thing to do.  He doesn't realize that form is at least as important as function.

Hancock seemed a bit over the top at times.  In one scene, he throws a kid so far up in the air that he has to wait a minute or two to catch him.  (Another scene is not fit for describing in mixed company, but you won't be able to listen to the theme to Sanford and Son the same way.)  The bad guys, on the other hand, seemed a bit flat.  I felt like they were just there to give Hancock something to do.

I don't know if there was any source material, like we have with other superheroes, who seem to be based mostly on comics.  This was a good thing for me because it all seemed new.  Even though comic-based books do deviate a little from the source material, you generally know the basic information like where they came from and who the main bad guys are.  (Despite never having read a comic book in my life, I can usually point out the minor changes to the story.)

I felt like Hancock's back story could have been spread out a little.  We spend a good portion of the movie learning about the basics of Hancock, like what a jerk he is.  We also learn that he woke up with amnesia, not knowing who he was.  Then, we have a good portion of his history dumped on us all at once.  I could have seen the information being spread out over several movies.  A hero with amnesia does seem interesting.

Despite the flaws, I do recommend the movie to people.  This is not a movie for children, as there's quite a bit of name calling and vulgarity, not to mention images that small children may not be able to deal with.  Interestingly enough, it does look like there will be a sequel, at least according to IMDb.  I'd definitely be interested in seeing it. 

IMDb page

Lone Survivor (2013)

WARNING:  I’m going to give away major details about the movie that may spoil it.  You’ve been warned.


I generally don’t like movies that start in the middle or end of the story.  With Lone Survivor, we not only know that one person will survive, but we spend most of the movie knowing that Mark Wahlberg’s Marcus Luttrell, is going to be that survivor.  We start with Luttrell being evacuated and treated, so we have to figure he makes it out alive.

The story is of a SEAL team sent in to kill a Taliban leader, identifiable by the fact that he‘s missing an ear lobe.  Luttrell is one of four men sent in to kill him.  We get to see some SEAL training in the beginning, just to see how tough team members are.  It doesn’t take long for the mission to go south, leaving the team to retreat.

The main problem is that three goat herders happen to find their location, setting up a predicament.  They can’t very well let them go, as the herders could reveal their location before they could get away.  Even keeping them alive could provide them opportunity to somehow get word back.  No one wants to kill three people who did nothing to the SEAL team, so the decision is made to leave them tied up and seek higher ground so that they might call for extraction.

It’s never that easy.  You never have a movie where everything goes right.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a movie.  As I said, Luttrell is the only one that survives.  The other three are killed when the locals figure out where they are.   Parents should be warned that there is a lot of fighting and, by extension, bloodshed.  It’s not the kind of thing that children should watch.

This wouldn’t have been my first choice for a movie.  My parents rented it through Netflix and asked if I wanted to watch.  I decided to give it a try and ended up watching the whole thing.  The movie is based on a book, which was an account of Operation Red Wings.

It’s difficult to really go into any sort of detail about the movie because so much of it is the action.  The first part of the movie is getting to know those involved in the mission.  The second part is the team trying to get out of a bad situation.  I probably never would have rented the movie on my own.  It’s not the kind of movie I usually go for.

Most of this is that the story is tenuous.  The entire thing is predicated on one thing going wrong.  If the team hadn’t been discovered, the mission may very well gone off without a hitch.  Yes, this is based on a true story, but how many teams accomplish their missions flawlessly?  How many times does a mission have one or two mistakes, but still work?  As I said, I started the movie knowing something bad was going to happen and that we’ be building up to that.  It’s one of those situations where the title gives away the movie.

Lone Survivor Official Trailer #1 (2013) - Mark Wahlberg Movie HD

Official Site

Battleship

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions accouint.


I remember seeing these mock coming attractions for a movie based on Where’s Waldo.  It was pretty clever.  They had Waldo as someone trying to evade several groups like the mob, if I recall.  The police may have been after him, too.  There was even another mock trailer for a movie from someone else based on Minesweeper.  It struck me as odd that you could essentially make a movie from any source material.  (I think the Minesweeper trailer may have been implying that Hollywood was doing just that.)

Then, one day, I saw a trailer for Battleship.  Except this one wasn’t a mock trailer.  It was an actual trailer for an actual movie called Battleship.  I asked myself if it was the same Battleship that I used to play as a kid.  Turns out, it was.  I had to see this just to see what they had done with the premise.  Instead of seeing it in the theaters, I waited for it to come out on DVD.

The most obvious reference to the board game was the name.  Since there were no characters or real plot in the game, most of the rest of the movie is new.  It starts with the announcement of an Earth-like planet being found far, far away.  A signal being sent to the planet in hopes of making friendly contact.  Meanwhile, Alex and Stone Hopper in a bar celebrating Alex’s birthday.  Alex has an interest in the beautiful Samantha.  Alex nearly gets arrested trying to impress her.  Stone gives him the option of joining him in the Navy instead of going to jail, which Alex accepts.  You see, Samantha’s father is an admiral.  This should impress her to no end.

We cut to the present day.  Alex is still a screw-up, but now he’s a lieutenant.  He’s serving aboard the USS John Paul Jones.  Stone is the commanding officer of the USS Sampson.  The two brothers and their respective ships are set to do training exercises with a Japanese ship.  Samantha’s father is there.  He’s the admiral running the training exercises.  While underway, five alien ships show up.  One crashes into a satellite and destroys a good chunk of Hong Kong in the process.  The remaining four end up in the Pacific Ocean not far from the training exercises.

The aliens set up a force field encompassing Hawaii and the surrounding ocean, cutting the Sampson, John Paul Jones and a Japanese ship off from the rest of the world.  Alex is sent over to have a look at one of the alien ships.  When Alex touches the ship, the aliens very quickly destroy the Sampson and the Japanese ship, leaving some survivors.   When Alex makes it back to the John Paul Jones, he finds out that the commanding and executive officers are both dead, leaving him in command.  It’s up to Alex to defend the Earth.

There weren’t many references to the board game that I caught initially.  In fact, Alex points out that actual battleships have been retired.  (The modern-day portion begins on the USS Missouri, a battleship that‘s now a museum.  The three active-duty ships are all destroyers.)  There is one line where someone says something to the effect of, “They’re not going to sink this battleship.”  The aliens also fire something similar to the pegs used in the game.  Other than that, it wasn’t until I started looking at IMDb and other sites that I realized the other references.

I came into the movie not really expecting much.  I knew that the connection to the board game would be thin.  I just had to see what they did with it.  That being said, it was a pretty decent action movie.  What do you think you’ll get from a movie called Battleship?  It’s mostly fighting with the story being about a kid who goes from wasting his talent to leading a crew to victory.

Yes, there were plot holes.   For starters, how did Alex go from getting in trouble at every chance to not only being a lieutenant, but the commanding officer of a ship?  I’ve heard of people being given the choice of military service as an alternative to jail hoping that the service will straighten them out.  Usually, it does.  However, right before the main action, Alex starts a fight with the captain of the Japanese ship, which does not impress Samantha’s father.  In fact, Stone informs Alex that he’ll likely face court-martial upon their return.

It actually surprised me that they used a board game.  It could have gone horribly wrong.  At least with something like a comic book, you have a well-structured universe in place.  This isn’t to say that the movie was spectacular.  The movie seemed to be more a vehicle for the CGI and some in-jokes related to the game.  The movie was at least enjoyable.  There are worse ways to spend 131 minutes.  I’m just not holding my breath for Scrabble:  The Movie.


 Battleship Movie - trailer HD