Entertaining blockbuster with brains

Rating: 8/10 (3 July 2008)

No doubt about it, at the beginning of the film you won't find the idea of spending 100 minutes with the surly John Hancock a pleasant one. He is a superhero who, despite saving many lives and catching even more criminals in his duty, also causes millions of dollars of damage, and his grumpy unsociable demeanour does not win him over with the public in his native LA. But all fears that this film will be as tetchy and charmless as its eponymous star are quickly banished.
Hancock is a superhero film that drops all the natural clichés and instead goes about its business doing things its own way. There is no big "origin" scene, no defined hero and villain; rather there is a set of characters that must learn to live with each other.
Will Smith, one of the few Hollywood stars that will guarantee a profit-turning film, delivers a convincing performance as the washed-up superhuman Hancock, particularly considering that "charmless" is not his forte. Apart from going against his natural type-cast, Smith is not required to give too much to this performance, leaving the special effects to do the bulk of the job, which they do with gusto. No doubt the main objective of the film is to entertain the masses, and it does this considerably well, maintaining an intense pace throughout and adding more twists and turns than would normally be found in a film twice its length.
In its bid to engage, it does leave a noticeable hole where characterization should be. Only briefly is the subject of the loneliness of Hancock touched upon, and Hancock's PR guru, Ray, is far too one-dimensional considering his role to the plot. The importance of this character is played up in the film's first half, and then diminished in the closing half as his wife, played by Charlize Theron, replaces him as the film's second main character.
This film is by no means faultless, but in terms of blockbusters, particularly superhero blockbusters, it is unpredictable, inventive and, bar a sugar-sweet ending, far removed from the formulaic plots that generally clog up the summer schedules. Despite this, it still manages to do what all big-budget films strive to achieve, and that is to entertain.