Hancock: The Comprised Cut?

David Poland of Movie City News is up with a surprisingly positive and refreshingly spoiler-free look at Hancock. It's the kind of review that makes me see a movie that I was previously lukewarm on. I share his affection for The Rundown and I love Friday Night Lights (didn't like The Kingdom much, but that was for reasons seemingly unrelated to Berg). But there is another big factor to consider.

According to Arclight Cinemas, it's a mere 92 minutes. It was previously listed as 115 minutes. As many know from the New York Times article back in May, the film has been batted around many times as the filmmakers struggled to get a PG-13 out of a script that was intended to be a hard-R. I think we all knew this would be the final result, but it is disheartening none the less. So, instead of just releasing a worthwhile 115 minute R-rated movie, they chop the film up to 92 minutes, steal that PG-13 and hope for the best.

Maybe the 92 minute cut is very good. Poland and I have been in relative agreement for most of the summer (loved Speed Racer, liked Indy 4, disliked Iron Man, hated Incredible Hulk), and the promise of worthwhile plot twists that can't be revealed has peaked my interest.

But, just like The Incredible Hulk, we're asked to fork over a ticket price for a movie where it's all but advertised that we're getting an appetizer for the super-duper uncut, unrated, director's cut in November on DVD or BluRay.

This is different from a comedy that slaps a few minutes back into the DVD release and calls it' unrated'. That's cheap, but it's fair. It's still the same movie. But this, where it's obvious that the film we're seeing is not the film as it was intended, well that's the kind of thing that makes me pay $6 on a Friday morning before work instead of an evening ticket price. Basically, we're paying for Hancock: The Compromise Cut.

PS - Final weekend numbers - not much to comment on here.

The list...

The only real news is that Incredible Hulk kept its drop to a 'mere' 61% and that The Happening kept its almost record-breaking plunge to a 'mere' 65%. Everything else was whatever I said on Friday, times three.