The Hancock Twist

Hancock, the recent super hero movie starring Will Smith, relies on an unexpected plot twist to hold the interest of the audience. After having set up the situation of Hancock as the drunken, misanthropic super hero, the film makers pull the Hancock twist.

In this case, the twist involves Mary Embrey, the wife of the PR flack Ray Embrey, played by Charlize Theron. Hancock, scruffy looking and in obvious need of a bath as he is, finds himself invited to the Embrey household for dinner as part of Ray's plan to try to make him over. Hancock and Mary are left alone in the kitchen for a moment. Hancock finds himself inexplicably drawn to Mary and it looks like he is going to try to kiss her.

Then Mary throws Hancock through the wall. The Hancock twist is that Mary has similar powers to Hancock, but has been living in secrecy and obscurity, like Samantha Stevens, as Ray's housewife.

The Hancock twist is similar to many in other films that almost instantly change the nature of the story. It can occur in the middle of the film, just changing the course of the story, or at the end, illustrating that what we thought was the story is actually another story.

M. Night Shyamalan loves to use the twist. In The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan reveals at the end that Malcolm Crowe, the psychologist who is treating Cole, played by Haley Joel Osment, is in fact one of the dead people that only Cole can see. That causes certain puzzling scenes in the movie to suddenly make sense. In Shyamalan's Unbreakable, Samuel L. Jackson's Elijah Price reveals to Bruce Willis's David Dunn that just as Dunn is a super hero, he (Price) is his counterpart super villain.