Hancock is the dark underbelly of the Will Smith persona - the hero who wants nothing to do with heroism; the wise-ass whose wise-assery is anything but charming, and actually conceals deep pain and loneliness. Yes, deep pain and loneliness in a summer superhero action-comedy. Oh good, pass the popcorn.
It's clear from early on that Hancock wants to be more than a goofy ride - there's a weird undercurrent beneath Smith's angsty gruffness, the jaunty, debris-splashing CGI antics. Mostly it's the photography - grainy, often Lumet-like in its intimacy, sometimes hectic. It's nerve-jangling, not iconic and sleek like Batman; not plastic-toy-toned and soaring like Spider Man.
At times the film does a decent impersonation of a goof on superhero routines: Hancock dozes on a bench while some baddies shoot up the freeway. A kid wakes Hancock up, only to be verbally abused. Hancock, tired and hungover and in no mood to save humanity, shoots himself off the bench in a burst of concrete, and flies drunkenly through downtown L.A., bobbing and weaving through the skyscrapers...and never dropping his bottle of bourbon. He tears off the roof of the bad guys' getaway car - they know who Hancock is, yet they try to shoot him. He threatens to turn their heads into butt-plugs. They fail to heed.
What seems like the movie's central comic conceit then kicks in: Hancock's destructive way of stopping crime has made him a hated figure. So what does he need? A P.R. guy. Fortune throws one in his path - actually, the guy's in the path of a train, and Hancock saves him (not without destroying the train and a few cars). The P.R. man, Ray (Jason Bateman, not as adorable as in Juno), is kindly and idealistic and sort of a failure, and thinks he can help Hancock. To redeem his image, the misfit superhero agrees to submit to a prison sentence, complete with anger-management courses.
The prison sequence is a lot like the early comic carnage - amusing, but not as funny as it seems like it should be. The film seems content to coast along on its premise, and the performances of its attractive and personable stars - including Charlize Theron who plays Ray's wife Mary, who doesn't think Hancock can be redeemed. And then...well, clearly, someone thought the superhero-goof conception wasn't meaty enough and called in the twist-police. I won't get into specifics cause that would ruin it...let's just say the tone darkens. A lot.
Hancock is caught in a sort of limbo - it's not witty or inventive enough to really take off as a comedy, and it's not visually stirring enough to succeed when it tries to become weightier. It's not really that ambitious in either of its movements. It's a bit of a formal oddity, the way it shifts strategies - a film student might get a decent kick out of dissecting the way director Peter Berg has attempted to modulate the thing. And the villain sucks - he's too much of a convenience. The film might've worked for real had an effort been made to establish a genuine adversary for Hancock - someone who was bent on destroying Hancock from the beginning maybe, who was worthy of his own storyline that could then converge with Hancock's (like Lex Luthor in the various incarnations of Superman). The villain has been conceived in the same half-lazy way as the rest of the film.
As for this summer's crop of superhero movies: I missed Iron Man (couldn't make myself go), and the Hulk basically sucked except for that two minutes when it suddenly turned into Cloverfield. Let's hope The Dark Knight gets it done. Hancock didn't.
