Will Smith as the reluctant Superhero Hancock.

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2008)

I will admit that I didn't like the way this movie got started, but after I realized where it was going then I was able to relax and enjoy it for what it is, a very unconventional love story.
Will Smith is John Hancock, with most of the powers we usually associate with Superman. But he is a social misfit, seemingly with no direction in his life. He is a loner, living in a trailer near the ocean, and seems to spend most of his spare time with a bottle of booze to his mouth. As a result, when the cops seek him out to help, he flies erratically, shearing off parts of buildings in the process, tends to tear up the road with his landings, and destroys cars, trucks, and trains that happen to be nearby. As a result the public has a love/hate feeling about Hancock, and lately mostly hate.
Hancock doesn't know his history. Eighty years earlier he woke up in a Miami hospital and didn't know who he was. When it was time to release him he was asked to "put your John Hancock here" and assumed his name was John Hancock! Because of his superpowers he doesn't age as a normal person would.
Into the picture comes Jason Bateman as P.R. expert Ray Embrey. Ray sees an opportunity to polish Hancock's image, to make him more valuable to society and turn him into a gentleman. Part of that was for Hancock to submit to prison time for all the things he had destroyed, and in the process learn to quit drinking.
The third key character is Charlize Theron as Ray's wife, Mary Embrey. We notice that she is very hesitant when she first meets Hancock at her home, but we don't know why. But it becomes an important part of the story.
So here we have 3 very good actors in Smith, Bateman, and Theron. They create very interesting characters and the movie is very entertaining. While it starts out looking more like a broad comedy, it in fact ends up having a nice dramatic story embedded.
MAJOR SPOILERS: About mid-way into the movie we find out that Mary and Hancock are alike, but in fact she is more powerful than he is. Both of them have lived for thousands of years and in fact are married. But the tragedy of their kind is that the closer they get to each other, the less effective are their powers, to the point that they can die. That is what had happened 80 years earlier in Miami. Now, that almost happens again, when an escaped crook comes for revenge, and both Hancock and Mary are shot. However Hancock has just enough power left that he is able to escape and get further away and, just as we think Mary is dead, she begins to regain her strength. So they both continue in their immortal lives, but are destined to stay away from each other.