Hancock. On DVD Tuesday. (******6/10)
Hancock has a great star. It has a great soundtrack. And it has a great premise. Will Smith stars as a superhero with a drinking problem, a man who saves people just because that seems to be the thing he should be doing, while showing complete disregard for the property he destroys while doing so, or the massive amount of destruction he creates while rescuing innocent people and stopping criminals. I absolutely love the idea that this is the first movie I’ve seen that really shows the consequences of the actions of a superhero. Sure, he stopped the gun-toting bad guys, but in doing so he’s caused four million dollars worth of damage to L.A. highways and buildings.
A few funny scenes open the film, with Smith flying through highway signs, destroying cop cars with his drunken buffoonery, and eventually setting down the SUV full of bad guys on top of a building in the sky over Los Angeles. But the movie quickly takes a turn when he meets Jason Bateman - in another hilarious scene where Hancock saves Bateman from a train, then unnecessarily destroys the train rather than getting out of the way. The one thing I wish I had seen in this film is a little more of the consequences of these actions. With the train derailment, the cop cars exploding, wouldn’t there be a rather heavy toll in terms of human life? Why are we hearing about the monetary vaule of the damage when people clearly would have died? Well, as it turns out, Peter Berg wanted to maintain a light tone in the movie, and keep some humour in there. And it would be tough to do that if Hancock was actually killing people.
When he meets Bateman, a P.R. man, the movie changes as Bateman tries to change Hancock’s public image. He realizes that deep down beneath the drunken exterior, Hancock really just wants to be liked. And he convinces Hancock to respond to the 6,000+ outstanding warrants out for his arrest. The theory being that if Hancock goes to jail, he will be seen by the public as admitting his sins, and that eventually the public will miss him when crime rises. And, for the most part, it works. We learn a little bit about Hancock’s back story, and yet another story line develops, this one involving Bateman’s wife, played by Charlize Theron. And by this time there is too much going on. And we stop caring, even when things start coming together.
A drunken superhero is a great idea - how would one arrest this man? Who could possibly convince him to sober up? Would the lives he saves be worth it compared with the lives he inadvertently takes? All of these things are touched upon in Hancock, but it isn’t quite enough. In the end, there is nothing terribly interesting about the movie. Watching Will Smith is always a good time, and he is reliably engaging as the imbittered, sour Superman figure. But the bizarre story twists near the end feel like a clumsy way to create some actual drama. You have an invincible superhero, and he’s the only one of his kind on Earth. So in order for there to be a real bad guy who can actually kill Hancock, and therefore create some drama in a will-he-make-it sort of way, they had to find a way for this to come about. And it’s contrived and irritating.
Hancock is decent. It features a great Will Smith (but we all knew he would be), and a solid premise with interesting ideas. But I would have really liked to see those interesting ideas explored more, and (amazingly) I’d have liked to see Charlize Theron less.