6) Hancock
It wasn’t just one edgy, potentially great scene cut out of Peter Berg’s Hancock, but several, all of which carried the spirit of the original project.
Basically, Berg sanded it down from an R to a PG-13, and took out everything that made the film interesting in the first place. A bit of background: Hancock was conceived by Vincent Ngo as Tonight He Comes, a darker than dark superhero movie that imagined Superman as an asshole alcoholic with behavioural issues. Going through several directors over the years, it finally landed in Peter Berg’s lap in 2006.
Ngo envisioned Tonight He Comes as an intense, darkly comical superhero movie, the likes of which no one had ever seen. Berg filmed something close to that, but it was made more family-friendly in the edit.
You can see the infamous scene where Hancock super-ejaculates holes in a roof whilst in bed with a woman as a deleted scene; what you can’t see is the even darker stuff, involving Hancock swearing like a sailor and getting drunk with kids.
This could have been an epochal, mature superhero movie; instead, we got a bland, forgettable studio flick.
Published: Sep 18, 2015 09:00 am