Superman with a drinking problem

Hancock
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Here’s a brilliant premise: What if L.A. had a resident superhero? He’s amazingly strong, impervious to bullets, has the ability to fly. But let’s say his job requirements get to be too taxing, and he becomes withdrawn and unreliable, a homeless sadsack with a drinking problem.

And as played by Will Smith, one of the best mainstream movie actors working today, “Hancock” really should have been a smash. Unfortunately, it’s a bust.

We learn that our hero-of-sorts, John Hancock, woke up in a Miami hospital some 80 years ago with amnesia. Since then, almost without reason, he has had super strength, and is practically on-call with the LAPD to swoop in and save the day. As the movie opens, Hancock, suffering from a nasty hangover, flies in to intervene in a high-speed freeway chase, leaving $7 million worth of destruction in his wake.

Hancock keeps the crime rate low, but he’s a jerk and a sloppy drunk—he’s like that next door neighbor who is annoying and insolent, but who comes in handy whenever your washing machine breaks. Taking advice from a PR guy (Jason Bateman), Hancock tries to restore his public image by serving a prison sentence for the damages he’s caused in the city. He’s excused from jail, however, when he’s called out to foil a bank robbery, and it’s at this point that a big secret is revealed and the movie takes a more serious turn.

As the film indulges in big-budget action sequences, I was yearning to know more about Hancock himself. He’s been a superhero for at least 80 years, so he’s no doubt had some amazing experiences in his lifetime. Imagine the stories he could tell, the countries he’s visited, the significant historical events he’s witnessed. The movie never seems to realize his potential as a character, and I wish he had been given more of a backstory.

Smith and Bateman inject their characters with enough personality that they alone hold our interest for nearly an hour. But the screenplay seems to exhaust all of its good ideas early on, and the story starts to fade when it really should be taking off. It introduces its villain far too late, it hardly gives us an exposition and it never fully exploits the possibilities of its surprise subplot.

Apparently the script for “Hancock” has been floating around Hollywood for more than a decade now. You’d think that would have given them enough time to do some re-writes.

Grade: C

Directed by Peter Berg. Written by Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan. Starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman and Eddie Marsan. PG-13; 92m.