Nice new theme; but the handling could have surely been better!

Rating: 4/10 (24 July 2008)

Looks like we have been having a deluge of superheroes off late; while Superman, Batman & Spiderman have lived well for long on large screen and in our memories, Fantastic Four, Iron man, etc made good entries; cat woman and other pretenders came too. Hancock is the new kid on the block. Unkempt, drunk and lost, but with immense powers, invulnerability, immortality and a good heart characterize the protagonist here.
Not being the typical superhero, John Hancok saves lives, but unintentionally creates civic losses running into millions which leads to disdain for him among locals and the authorities. Just when he is busy doing his usual stuff, he saves a struggling PR agent from a sure death. The latter then offers his services to Hancock to make him acceptable to the society, much to the displeasure of his wife. Hancock too reluctantly accepts.
Hancock then learns his ways from Ray, the PR guy and works towards making himself acceptable to the society. But things take a strange turn when he starts to feel long lost things about Ray’s wife Mary who then reveals that they were angels created in pairs and that they lose powers and be mortal if they got close. She begs him to leave her so that he can do the world good. Oh well, they had to show some vulnerability, right?
Hancock is a very short a film at 80 minutes, which makes you feel as if you flew through it. You barely realize that the story is going somewhere, and lo, you have an interval break. The rest of the movie finishes in a flash. I really don’t call this piece of work as ‘tight screenplay’ as some may do. On the tech stuff, though it had its share of action sequences, the camera work and the SFX don’t seem too convincing.
With Will Smith, this year’s earning actor according to Forbes can surely bring in the draw at the box office. Surely, he has the charm in him that makes you feel for a character who is so clumsy for a large part of the film and usually messes up stuff. Charlize Theron, well, at first I wondered ‘what’s she doing in here?’ till the time it is revealed that she too is Hancock type. Phew; the story gets tiresome after that!
The villains too weren’t really imposing enough to really challenge someone who is shown a superhero. The editing feels as if someone wanted to hurriedly wrap up. The script begins with a promise but makes you feel that there was a lot of room for improvement. Despite it having brilliant leads in Will Smith and older but is still lovely Theron, it falls flat. Surely, I wouldn’t recommend that you burn your bucks on this!