Producers of 'Hancock' don't understand what subtitles are
'Hancock' is a Will Smith movie. Which means it's the kind of movie you describe with the name of the star in it, not the director, or the writer, or the genre, or the plot. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Nike symbol billboard on an interstate: It exists only to maintain the brand of its main dialogue-sayer.
We all know that if action movies were pie recipes, the equivalent of 'preheat oven' would be 'open with action sequence'. The first 45 seconds of Will Smith Crumble throw us into a high-speed chase in LA, where gun-toting youths have stolen a SUV. Smith intercepts them and has a wee chat before impaling their car on the top of a building.
The car thieves, all Asian, speak their native language for the first few minutes. Look at the subtitles.
The movie inserts grammatical errors into the subtitles to make them sound like Asian stereotypes.
I don't know the grammar of Chinese or any other Asian languages, so I don't know if this construction is correct according to whatever language they're speaking, but come on. Have the writers of this movie ever seen a foreign film? Subtitles don't translate word-for-word. It's not like German movies are subtitled with shit like "You like when I making the food, jaaaaa?" Japanese films don't have "Ridicurous!" along the bottom of the screen.
Seriously, do they get what subtitles are? These people are speaking their native language. (Well, presumably. They switch to English when Smith lifts the car off the road. You know, like how most of the world's population speaks English when they get stressed out or just tired of their own nonsense-sounds, right?). The least the producers could do is let them speak their own language properly.
This would matter less if there was anything in the movie to distract me from my mild annoyance at the first three minutes. The 'Hancock' director and writers (plural -- always, always plural) have approached this movie with the enthusiasm of an overweight teenager doing a morning workout, and the plot gives up and collapses on the linoleum at about the 37-minute mark. The rest is mostly slo-mo and mumbo-jumbo and other hyphenated suckiness. In other words, I no pay for next Will Smith movie.
Comments
I agree that such subtitles are racist—I would deem it acceptable if the speakers themselves spoke their native language poorly and the subtitles were meant to reflect that. Out of interest, definite articles as English speakers know them do not exist in Chinese, usually substituted with the equivalents of this, that, these and those.