The Truth About “Hancock”, A Movie That Was Ruined After 10 Years In Development Hell

Hancock isn’t the first movie to suffer from the deteriorating hand of Hollywood’s ass-backwards marketability-over-quality system. Hell, it’s not even the first Will Smith movie. Just last year, the equally bastardized I Am Legend met a startlingly similar fate. It was one half of a good movie, with the rest of it being unable to overcome the onslaught of script rewrites, studio interference, and the deadly touch of writer/producer Akiva Goldsman. This is even more true of Hancock, and the resulting film is nothing short of puzzling. I’d even go as far as to say the movie is practically unreleasable in its current state. But before I get into why exactly that is, let us examine the movie that could have been.

In 1996, screenwriter Vincent Ngo wrote a spec script titled Tonight, He Comes. (And yes, the sexual implications of that title are very much intentional.) The script was a Hollywood favorite, floating to numerous potential directors, such as Tony Scott (True Romance, Déjà Vu) and Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral). After sitting on the table for five years and hopping between studios, one thing became clear: as much as everyone loved the script, the only way to get the movie made was to completely butcher everything that made it unique. (I believe the Hollywood term for this is “to make it more marketable.”) The script suffered massive rewrites, with even producer Akiva Goldsman at one point getting a chance to put his uncredited but very noticeable stamp on it.

Eventually, production finally got underway, with Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) in the director chair. Had all the problems been finally taken care of? Nope. Mostow later dropped out of the project due to creative differences. Then Italian director Gabriele Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness) got on board. Now? Still no. Muccino also dropped out with regards to creative differences.

The burden of directing would later fall to Peter Berg, who along with the studio agreed that the film still needed to be “lightened up.” To again refer back to my mastery of Hollywood terminology, this can be translated to, “Will Smith attracts teen audiences, so we wanted to go with a comfortable PG-13 rating, regardless of there being R-rated elements in the film that were pivotal to the storyline.”

So, anyway, that’s what it took to get the movie made, but what about the script itself? How similar is Ngo’s spec script compared to what we actually saw in Hancock? Well, having read the original script (you can too, thanks to Hollywood Elsewhere, or just get the gist of it over at Latino Review), I can safely say: not a whole fucking lot.

Literally the only semblance of Ngo’s draft to be found in the final film is the fact that there’s a drunken superhero named Hancock and a family (man, wife, son). That’s it. The characters act and talk entirely different, and just about every plot point has been altered significantly. What was once a harsh, bitter, intelligent, and thought-provoking character study of a washed-up, borderline-psychotic superhero became something else entirely. It became two halves of two very different films. And while that first half of Hancock proves that not all of the changes made by the studio-hired writers were necessarily bad, the second shows the obvious effects of having way too many cooks in the kitchen. Particularly when those cooks are fucking idiots.

In order to elaborate on that, I need to venture into spoiler territory, so if you’re not interested in having an already ruined movie ruined for you, don’t read any further.

[YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. SPOILERS AHEAD.]

The scene that destroys Hancock can be pinpointed to the second. Following some very poorly developed sexual tension between Will Smith and Charlize Theron, Smith tries to kiss her, and she throws him through the side of the house. As it turns out, she too is a superhero. (As M. Night Shyamalan would say, “What a twist!”)

Was this revelation necessary? No. Did it have anything to do with the storyline that had been established up until that point? No. Does it serve any purpose later on to connect back to the film’s initial premise? No. Does it even make any sort of logical sense? No, no, and no. It’s the most generic, clichéd studio-injected Hollywood bullshit you can possibly find in a movie, and everything that follows only amplifies that fact.

I honestly don’t understand it. There is no reason to go through the trouble of presenting this original spin on the superhero genre if you’re just going to abandon that concept 45 minutes in. Seeing as how the same type of problem occurred in I Am Legend, I’m going to put the blame here squarely on Akiva Goldsman (who in both instances was called in for rewrites to the script). That film featured several interesting ideas in its early scenes, such as early signs of the creatures being more than just mindless killing machines, but those things were quickly axed from the film to make way for that dumb religious bitch and her mute kid.

Likewise, Hancock begins with a very interesting idea: what if you had a sleazy alcoholic superhero that society was fed up with for causing so much excessive damage with his unorthodox brand of vigilante justice? This premise is handled relatively well for most of the film, but as soon as that twist occurs, the entire focus changes. Suddenly it becomes yet another bland nonsensical origin story, complete with dull love-triangle melodrama, randomly thrown in “rules” about how superheroes function in the world, and the lamest, most half-assed villain since Nuclear Man in Superman IV. It doesn’t just become a bad movie; it becomes only half of a bad movie, with all of the resolution coming strictly from subplots that were introduced in the final act.

The issue gets even more complicated once you examine the film’s political subtext. As critic Kyle Smith has noted and elaborated upon in his review, Hancock is an allegory to how the U.S. operates with other countries. The character Hancock represents America: he’s the most powerful force in the world, and despite being an arrogant asshole, actually tries to come to the aid of others. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work out, because his “help” is usually not needed or asked for, and he oftentimes ends up causing more problems than anything else.

Meanwhile, Jason Bateman’s character reflects the good in society: he wants to help the world, knows how to do it, but doesn’t have the power to do so. When him and Hancock team up though, Bateman’s character is able to get Hancock to accept his actions, pay his debt, and work with society by helping only when called upon, just like America should. If you’re still not sold on the analogy, there are other aspects of the film to support it: the character’s name is John Hancock (who was one of the United States’ Founding Fathers), his symbol is the eagle (the national symbol of the USA), he hates little Frenchmen, etc.

Yet, once again, we strike that same barrier. If this allegory was intentional, why is everything that it was building toward discarded at the halfway point? It’s almost as if there were so many writers shoveling on new alterations to the script that somebody forgot to pass the memo on to the director that there was still an underlying message lingering within the final shooting draft.

It just goes to show you, no matter how intelligent, creative, or brilliant the minds behind a certain movie may be, Hollywood can always find a way to fuck it up.