lolwut?

Rating: 3/10 (7 July 2008)

...was the reaction I had by the time I finished watching the movie. As much as I have a distaste for using stupid internet acronyms seriously, that's quite literally how I felt.
The movie had an interesting premise, in a superhero who is a moody, drinking misanthrope with a particular twitch-spot for being called an asshole.
Very early on Hancock's path crosses with That Guy (Jason Bateman's character, the PR guy, whose name is completely forgettable) and they start trying to change him. Maybe 20 minutes into the movie or less, Hancock goes to prison to show people he won't flaunt the law, and to have people clamoring to have him back when crime skyrockets.
The majority of the movie's fun happens within the first half, with scenes covered in the trailer (such as tossing a beached whale onto a sailboat) and some new ones not seen in the trailer (Hancock half-naked, his clothes having been burnt off from putting out a fire, cutting in front of kids in front of an ice cream truck and snatching some ice cream for himself), but these are all covered mostly in YouTube spots while That Guy shows Hancock how people don't like him.
After he's changed to be more decent, it gets touchy and warm and Hancock is a good guy after all.
Then comes the part that had been built up without subtlety... and spoilers follow.
It was rather overt that Mary (Charlize Theron) was going to be involved with Hancock, especially when the director goes out of his way to show her face in a closeup whenever he appears near her for several seconds longer than normal. Then comes a post-party scene, in which he basically corners her in a kitchen and tries to kiss her. Then she throws him into the refrigerator and send both crashing out into the street.
Oh ya, that's right. She's a superhero thing, too.
Then starts the whole "lolwut?" moment of the film,, as they try to have her trying to explain to Hancock, her husband, and all of us the whole deal, and fails quite miserably. The story she tells is some mess of them being some sort of godly creatures that were created by GOD (though it is PC never mentioned) in pairs, and that they've lived for like as long as the Bible says earth has existed.. a few thousand years.
Quite frankly, that's only my best-guess summarization of the mess of words thrown at us to see what would stick---in the end, it doesn't even matter what they are, as the point they drive home with brutal redundancy is that if the two of them are close by each other, they both lose their powers and become mortal, which is why Hancock lost his memory, because every time they get too close to each other in history, something bad happens and they have to depart, until one time in the late 20s when Hancock got amnesia (and a story of how he tried to sign out from the hospital, not knowing who he was, and a nurse asked him for his "John Hancock", as in signature).
The story doesn't seem to change, but they repeat it so many times in so many different ways that it throws people off, as they start thinking "wait, they're destined to be together", then "wait, they can't be together or they both become mortal and die", then "wait, they were built together by nameless-god", then "wait, they weren't meant to be together", then "wait, they're bound by fate to always be together" and so on and so on until you really don't care anymore and you just want someone to die just to change the pace.
The entirety of the movie's second-half plot no longer deals with any typical "good guy vs bad guy" or "hero must overcome" archetype, as a band of baddies escaping from jail try to kill Hancock become so unimportant that even Hancock doesn't spare a second glance at the TV when their breakout is announced on the news.
The entire focus is around explaining, then re-explaining, then convoluting the entire concept behind these two "godly" beings to a point where their explanations run into gaping plot-holes, the biggest one being: If Hancock's been living in LA long enough to become a household name, and staying in their house around her for several weeks before finding her out, why didn't he or Mary lose any of their powers being in the same city? Considering how she not only tells him to not see her family ever again, but to leave the entire city, and how Hancock starts losing his powers when he is very far away from her, it's completely nonsensical that he only starts to lose his powers AFTER she mentions it.
The ending is also nonsensical, as Hancock had earlier in the movie ended up losing his powers when he is shot in a liquor-store hold-up, who knows how far away from Mary's house, and when he and Mary are in the hospital, he starts immediately regaining his powers when he exits the hospital and starts putting a few meters' distance between them.
Ultimately, the entire second half of the movie resembled a nonsensical mess of a plot-hole big enough to fit the moon through and a complete lack of actual plot to drive the story other than Hancock's whole "should I leave the city so I can be a superhero or should I stay for... some reason never explained in the movie" Because the movie never really does explain why he should/would stay in LA after learning all this... it's not like he fell in love with Mary after his amnesia, and despite all of this revelation, Mary stays married to That Guy and Hancock leaves anyway for their own good. So what the hell?