Movie Review - Hancock

Take a script thats been rejected many times & had been doing the rounds for over 10 years. Then make it into a movie by adding your own ideas. And you get Hancock, Will Smith's latest offering about the not very super Superhero. He's a bum, a drunk & all his crime fighting, thief taking & life saving end up costing tax payers lots of money. So he ends up going to jail to try to reform his ways. He gets himself a publicist to improve his image (whose life he'd previously saved in a scene that looks like it was crowbarred into the movie just to get that character established) and eventually he's released early to help foil a bank robbery.

The movie is OK until Charlize Theron is revealed as another superhero & then it well & truly jumps the shark, with an awful looking CGI fight across the city & pointless storms that look very good but are never explained. The film then gets even worse when she says she's his sister & then gets totally pointless (to the point of being unwatchable in fact) when she admits to being his wife.

The whole "superheroes become mortal when we get close to each other" plot seemed very much like an afterthought added to the script by someone who was desperate to make this movie last a lot longer as it had run out of ideas. Hancock got out of jail way too early, we should have really seen him learning to harness his powers (which he obviously didn't have a clue how to use really) & gradually becoming a useful superhero - developing from the useless one he already was. There wasn't a bad or powerful enough villain to put against him so they fabricated the pointless romance to make him seem vulnerable.

Will Smith plays the drunken version of Hancock far more convincingly than the sober side. If the film had stuck to "what if a city had a superhero who wasn't really suited to the role" idea then it might have played out much better & been a more enjoyable film. As it was the "we
become mortal when we get close" idea was truly awful, no wonder this film had been rejected for over 10 years. If they'd stuck to "when superheroes go bad or were never any good in the 1st place" it might have been a much different and better film.

Best avoided as it adds nothing to the superhero film genre, in fact it actually detracts from it.