Hancock (***1/4)

Hancock (Will Smith) is a superhero with a difference, which is that he just barely gives a crap. He’s definitely super—able to withstand bullets, fly, and stop trains—but arguably no hero. Roused from a drunken stupor in the opening sequence, he puts a halt to an L.A. freeway shootout, but not without overturning a couple of cop cars and causing $9 million of property damage. Enter Jason Bateman as a PR guy who sees Hancock as a chance to get both a new client and do some good by reforming him. Although the TV commercial I saw for Hancock makes it look like another summer action film, it’s actually, in part, parodying the superhero genre. I’m sure it says something or other about American culture, or Hollywood, that they’re selling the movie by making it look more generic than it is.

Director Peter Berg (The Kingdom), working from a script by Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan, aims for an action parody that also has some emotional weight to it and also has elements of a buddy comedy. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. The first half is the funnier one, with Hancock’s attempts to remold himself. One of Smith’s bigger laugh lines is just his forced attempts to politely thank the police officers at the scene of the crime, even though, he notes, his having to help means they failed.

The dramatic aspect comes to the fore in the second half, where we learn Hancock’s history, and why the PR man’s wife (Charlize Theron) kept giving him strange looks earlier. This is the more uneven half, packing in too much information too quickly to generate the emotional heft to match the comedy. (For example, the story very gingerly hints at a racial discrimination theme, but it’s left unexplored.) There’s also a villain whom I never believed would come after a guy who seems to be invincible. But I quibble. Hancock, barely 90 minutes, is an unpretentious crowd-pleaser that entertains in several ways. Smith has shown a knack for choosing pictures that straddle genres, that are mainstream without (usually) seeming dumb. This along with a certain affabilty, has helped him win such a broad audience, and in this case it will be deserved.

IMDB link

viewed 6/23/08 (screening at Bridge); reviewed 7/1/08