Featured Review: HANCOCK

Hancock



Starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, Jae Head, Eddie Marsan, Thomas Lennon, Johnny Galecki.



Directed by Peter Berg



Grade: C-




"You got a problem, Thickness?"

Never doubt the power of Will Smith. Once the goofy star of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air and parent-friendly rap about homework and summer time, Smith is now Hollywood's most durable and bankable leading man. Hancock is sort of a theory on that idea. Market the film simply as a giant poster with Smith's giant head, leak out a general plot synopsis about a drunk superhero, release it on the 4th of July weekend, and watch the money roll in. It doesn't even have to be a good film, if Smith is the star, people will take their chances because he's that likable. And he is.

Smith plays John Hancock (or so we're told) the only man in the world with superhuman powers (or so we're told). But Hancock has become dismayed with the unforgiving public. Yes, he helps stops the bad guys, but because he's spent years feeling sorry for himself and getting drunk, his assistance is nearly as unwanted as it is helpful. After one particularly disastrous outing, he by chance saves the life of Ray (Jason Bateman), a bleeding-heart public relations man who in turn wants to change Hancock's image back to favorable. It begins to work in various degrees, until Hancock discovers friction coming from Ray's wife Mary (Charlize Theron). Then Hancock derails.

The first half or so of the film is surprisingly taut. Director Peter Berg establishes Hancock as a lazy drunk who just happens to be able to do anything he wants or needs to stop bad guys if he puts some effort into it. But he doesn't, so this anti-hero hero angle gets a decent amount of sight gags and chuckles out of it. More come when he deals with Ray and his family, as Ray attempts to straighten Hancock out by showing him ill-fated YouTube clips and sends him to prison to repent his crimes against the city while saving it.

The jail scenes are when Hancock begin to lag, but it doesn't completely falter until Theron gets more screen time. As an actress here, she is not terrible, but rather her character ruins the movie. Up to this point, she served as Ray's cynical but loving wife, not much of an entity at all. But when Hancock discovers she's harboring a secret, the film goes off the deep end into a muddled mess of half-baked ideas. No longer does it become funny and light-hearted, but gets heavy-handed and confusing. They do little to explain the reasoning behind the twist the film takes, and for that, we never really understand the point of the climax.

As Hancock, Smith is as entertaining and great to watch as he usually is. He starts off as just about an unlikable guy as you can get (and for that you like to watch him), and by the end of the movie has transformed into a good person who understands his civic responsibilities. It's not Smith's fault when his character gets painted into a corner with his own absurdist qualities. Bateman is also fun to see unfold, playing the everyman character he has down so pat. It's amazing that his sometimes anti-social sarcasm in real life gets him some flak, because on film Bateman is selfless in almost all of his roles post Arrested Development.

Perhaps the biggest problem besides the terrible fate of developing Theron's character is the direction. I'm all for Peter Berg going for a more gritty feel to distinguish Hancock as an anti-hero, but there are times in the film that the shaky camera work during scenes that are just expositional conversations that it's just not needed. It worked for him in the trenches of the Saudi Arabian territory of The Kingdom, but for Hancock it just distracted from the humor and/or emotional complexity (what they tried of it, anyway) the film offered.

The plot also suffers from some distracting inconsistencies. Hancock is seemingly able to do anything, but at other times you question that if he can do all of this, why does he still lack the gumption to use common sense, even after he's been remade as a citizen savior? And the validity of some convicts who escape prison to terrorize the later 'mortal' Hancock seem to lack logic as well. The same can be said of Theron's character in its entirety. She makes the movie play out like an expensive rip-off of Uma Thurman's My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

In one scene she visits Hancock with excessive eye-liner and a halter top underneath her jacket, when in the rest of the film she had been conservative and au naturale. So what, did she take the time to put it all on when she went to see him, or does her character just highlight her attributes naturally when her 'secret' is out? Little things like this can be overlooked in a better film, but Hancock is full of stuff like that. For example, Johnny Galecki (of Roseanne and The Big Bang Theory) and Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!) have co-star credits, and literally have 12 seconds of screen-time, combined.

Hancock is not the worst summer blockbuster out this year, nor is it the worst superhero movie. It's just one that suffers a fatal flaw, sprinkled with a few minor ones that serve as a couple of kicks to dead celluloid. If the crew could have found a way to keep the tone of the first half of the film, Hancock could have been an enjoyable 'B' graded movie. Instead, it just serves as a shining example to the ferocity and longevity of Will Smith's career. Put his face on a 20-foot, silk-screened poster, people will come.