Tuesday, July 1, 2008

a sure thing

Can many people still say they’re a Will Smith fan? Yea, he’s literally the biggest movie star in the world (and he’s worked hard for that). Yes, we all love him and think he's a good guy. Most importantly, he is as close to a sure thing as possible in terms of movie blockbusters. The Fourth of July: BBQs, fireworks, and a Will Smith movie. We know we will be entertained. Perhaps even enthralled. Cool one-liners, big explosions. Hoo-Rah. Exciting stuff!

Yet… watching his movies has become more of a habit than anything else. We don’t fervently YouTube clips from his movies the weeks leading up to the premiere. We don’t eagerly covet the DVD to add to our collection. The buzz around his films have nowhere to go but down after the opening weekend. We know that the big screen will provide adequate entertainment for a couple of hours, but beyond that, once the lights go up in the theater, Will Smith will reside in the back of our minds until next summer.

He tried, and succeeded to some extent, in changing our perception of him with In the Pursuit of Happiness. But you know, none of us really doubted his talent to begin with, so the whole undertaking seems kind of moot in the end.

And now, with Hancock, well, here was something that could have been interesting. Since I haven’t actually seen the movie, I won’t attempt to review it, uh, obviously. I can’t help but feel, however, that Hancock is already a disappointment.

It’s one of the first movies of his in a while that had the potential to bomb. Will is a superhero—but he’s a sucky person. Alcoholic, grumpy, mean. Possibly adulterous. (You know, if anyone could pull that off and still manage to be likeable at the end of the film, it’d be Will.) The movie is meant to be a dark satire on the superhero genre… but then with The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Hellboy, and The Dark Knight coming out this summer, satire and dark comedy doesn’t seem like it’d sell very well. The Fourth of July is for family-fun entertainment, dammit. So I think it could have bombed, in terms of blockbuster standards.

If it had stayed true to the original script, that is.

Will Smith was really taking a risk with this one. How long had the script been floating around, as something that was brilliant, but could never be made into a movie? (A while.) How many re-writes did it have to have? (Many.) How many directors? (A lot) How many scenes needed to be cut to bring it down to a PG-13 rating? (Uh… you get the point.) Somehow, in the end, the studio managed to turn Hancock, the alcoholic antihero, into an acceptable face to put on kids’ lunch boxes.

So what started out as a risky endeavor will never actually make it to the theaters. Even the trailer makes it more about the funny fluff than substance. (Though I will argue, that whale throwing scene and making a little girl cry is really pretty dark stuff if you think about it. It’s amazing what zippy shots and bombastic music in a trailer can do.)

With great risk comes great rewards. While the movie is now a sure hit in terms of dollars, a rated R Will Smith movie could have been really fascinating. With the amount of scenes reportedly cut, it’s amazing if the story still manages to be coherent, which I guess is something in itself, yet it’s frustrating that it could be so much more.

This weekend, Will Smith will be the awesome action hero we all know and love, and millions will go see him (myself included). I’ll enjoy it, I’m sure, but in the back of my mind, I’ll keep thinking about what could have been.


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I tend to get obsessive about things for a while, then get over it, and start to wonder what was wrong with me in the first place. Also, having no section for "Favorite TV Shows" makes absolutely no sense to me. That should tell you a lot right there.