Cockhan

Rating: 6/10 (8 April 2020)

With so many, many, many, many, many, many, many superhero movies bombarding audiences these days its hard to remember a time when there wasn't an unnecessary comic-book adaptation being forced in our increasingly tired faces. When Hancock was released in 2008 there was no DCEU, and there wasn't really an MCU either. Comic-book movies (of which this is not) and superhero movies were still struggling and finding their feet. Outside of Spider-Man, many of them were alienating and disappointing audiences (Hulk, Superman Returns, Fantastic Four) and while that may still be the case with most of these exhausting franchises, they are so ubiquitous that the hits cover-up the significant misses.
Hancock divided audiences in 2008 with many not understanding what it was trying to say or do. Now, more than ever, is it time to give Hancock a re-evaluation?
Will Smith (as his career was beginning a downturn) stars as a man with an unknown past who has superpowers, only his faith in people and enthusiasm for life causes the citizens of his hometown of Los Angeles to not appreciate his careless, lazy efforts at fighting crime and rescuing those in trouble. When he saves idealist public relations expert Ray Embrey (the always delightful Jason Bateman) from a trainwreck he is encouraged to turn around his attitude and allow the world to embrace him as a hero who really cares. But Ray's wife Mary (Charlize Theron) has secrets of her own and might know everything about Hancock's mysterious past.
This alone would have been enough to make a unique, adult-themed superhero movie, but it seems that several re-writes of the script decided that some kind of villain needed to be shoehorned in there where it didn't belong, and the movie flounders in the final act as a standard Hollywood ending conflicts and deflates the many new ideas that came before it. I still enjoy it way more than Deadpool (an ugly, depressing film which I despise). The 92-minute running time screams of a difficult time in the editing room and the struggle to find a traditional narrative in the flurry of ideas that were written, re-written, re-drafted, and re-arranged during the scripting phase. The movie was originally written in 1996 with the rather worrying title of Tonight, He Comes and was about a kid who struck up a friendship with a fallen superhero - really quite different from the final product.
With no toxic fanbase behind it, Hancock comes with a clean slate and is enjoyable as a comedy with some okay action scenes. We're all jaded and indifferent to this stuff by now and the physics and frequent 9/11 porn of superhero movies has been done to absolute, stone-cold, death, DEATH, D-E-A-T-H. Please stop making these! At least it doesn't end with a big blue light shooting up into the sky.
Peter Berg's direction is always merely a pastiche of whatever his peers are doing at the time, and Hancock has no unique visual flair, which would have been just fine if the original idea at its core was allowed to shine through the muddle of changes it obviously went through. It's a horse made by a committee.
It's a camel.