Hancock

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Before watching Hancock, it was hard to know what to make of it. Would it be a hilarious satire of superhero movies, or would it be the next My Super Ex-Girlfriend? Sure, its money-making prospects are not in doubt -- it's a fourth of July Will Smith movie -- but even the marketers haven't really known what to do with it. After a pretty cool teaser trailer, the ads have varied wildly, with some recent TV spots even making it look like some kind of heavy drama.

So what can you expect?

Well, for starters, you can expect two different movies. The first one is about a perpetually drunk, unpopular superhero named Hancock (Smith, of course) who gets an image makeover by a bleeding-heart public relations expert (Jason Bateman). It's very funny, has a lot of cool action scenes, and is all-around very polished Hollywood entertainment. Frankly, I loved it.

The problem is, it's fifty minutes long, and we've still got forty minutes to go to hit the full-length movie mark. So then it segues into the second movie: a three-character drama (with Smith, Bateman, and Charlize Theron, playing Bateman's wife) that explores Hancock's origin, takes some very strange detours, and throws in a few villains at the end.

They obviously had a lot of trouble with these last forty minutes, throughout the writing, filming, and editing: there wasn't enough plot, so they had to make something else up. What they ended up with works, but you can see some frayed edges: one character inexplicably undergoes a makeover at one point, the villains are undercooked (they appear in two or three scenes and are used only as plot devices) and I'm almost positive the resolution makes no sense.

You'll either go with it or you won't. But for me, I liked the first section of the movie so much that I was willing to follow it anywhere, and truth be told, they make even the end work a lot better than it might seem. I was initially skeptical that director Peter Berg's sensibilities would work with a superhero movie -- he favors a lot of handheld camera work and random documentary-style zoom-ins -- but it does work, and the special effects are top-notch. Unlike the cartoonish effects of Spider-Man, Hancock has a real heft: when he's flying through the air holding a car, you really feel like he's up there.

The most credit, though, goes to Will Smith. Charlize Theron does a good job, but she's cursed with an impossible character that's probably been re-written dozens of times. Jason Bateman (from Juno and Arrested Development) is, as always, hilarious. But Smith is the movie star, and he deserves every inch of that designation because he always brings his A game -- he knows how to entertain, and he works very hard, every time, to make sure he does. The opening scenes that establish his character are ...