Hancock (2008) Review

More and more I’ve found myself drawn into the spectacle of the big budget summer film. Sometimes the promise of big budget hi-jinks is too much even for this fanatic of the obscure. And after all the bad reviews I’ve heard and read, I want to step up and say, Hancock is not the dud it has been maligned to be.

Surely, I don’t have to tell you much about the plot. You know the story pretty well if you’ve been near a television in the past 3 months, so I’ll be brief. Will Smith plays Hancock, a superhero who has issues. He drinks too much, he’s reckless in his exploits, often causing millions of dollars worth of damage, and worst of all, he doesn’t care if people like him. Or does he? After saving good-natured PR man Ray (Jason Bateman) from a train, (at the expense of the train,) Ray offers to do a little PR for Hancock. You see, Hancock actually does care what people think of him, he just doesn’t know how to show it. So at Ray’s suggestion, Hancock offers himself up to the Los Angeles prison in a gesture meant to atone for the damage he’s caused the city over the years. Their hope is that when crime goes up without him, the people of LA will clamor for his return.

The first half of Hancock is breezy and fun. It plays almost as a send up of the superhero movies we’ve been beaten over the head with over the past few years or so, and it’s a breath of fresh air. Bateman and Smith are well cast: Smith is less goofy than you would expect after watching countless reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or even Men in Black. He plays Hancock as a man detached and cold, and while it’s a similar performance to last year’s I Am Legend, the choice helps create a certain amount of subtle empathy with the character. He makes snarky comments, and they are played for humor, but Smith’s dedication to the character never waivers. As usual, Bateman is the perfect straight man to Smith’s - er - straight man, making jokes so casually it makes you wonder if he’s acting at all. However, Charlize Theron seems a bit lost as Ray’s wife and an even worse mistake was getting Peter Berg to direct.

Berg’s style of verite filming, a mix of zoom-lens and shaky-cam, while perfectly suited to something like Friday Night Lights or The Kingdom, is more of a distraction here than a success. I can see what he’s trying to do: the juxtaposition of verisimilitude with off-the-wall superhero CG destruction sounds interesting enough, but the bombast and silliness of the first half makes it feel cheap. However, the style is much more suited to the second half.

The start of the second half of the film is announced by what everyone wants to talk about: the “twist.” Much has been said about the twist, but I can’t honestly say that the twist is all bad. It just seems to be in the wrong film. In trying to mash in a whole bunch of different plot points, the film forgets about cohesion and character development, which I always thought of as some of Berg’s biggest successes. At a slim 90 minutes, Hancock doesn’t afford itself the time for quick changes of pace and direction without taking the time to earn it, and what should have been an interesting plot point becomes shallow and off-putting.

The original script for Hancock was written over ten years ago, and Berg was quoted as likening it to “a scathing character study of (a) suicidal alcoholic superhero.” While he was impressed with that approach, it was his decision to lighten up the picture in the hope of broadening the audience. Whether or not it was a good idea, it was a decision that wasn’t fully committed to, and that hurt the overall tone of the film. It’s not as if juggling different genres and emotions is impossible or a bad idea. I’ve often lauded Save the Green Planet for being able to juggle horror and comedy seamlessly, but the mix of slapstick and drama here is a bit jarring. Hancock would have been a better film had he stuck to one idea or the other: summer comedy or heavy character drama. Still, like Berg’s other little failure Very Bad Things, it does more right than wrong and my $10.50 was well spent.