Pretty Dire

Rating: 2/10 (5 July 2008)

Take a script thats been rejected many times and had been doing the rounds for over 10 years. Then make it into a movie by adding your own ideas. And you get Hancock, Will Smith's latest offering about the not very super Superhero.
He's a bum, he's a drunk and all his crime fighting, thief taking & life saving end up costing tax payers lots of money. So he ends up going to jail to reform his ways. He gets himself a publicist to improve his image and eventually he's released early to help foil a bank robbery.
The movie is OK until Charlize Theron is revealed as another superhero and then it well & truly jumps the shark, with an awful CGI fight across the city & pointless storms that are never explained. the film then gets even worse when she says she's his sister and then gets totally pointless when she admits to being his wife.
The whole "we become mortal when we get close to each other" seemed very much like an after thought added to the script by someone who was desperate to make this movie last longer as it had run out of ideas. Hancock got out of jail way too early, there wasn't a bad or powerful enough villain to put against him so they fabricated the pointless romance to make him vulnerable.
Will Smith plays the drunken version of Hancock far more convincingly than the sober side. If the film had stuck to "what if a city had a superhero who wasn't really suited to the role" idea then it might have played out much better & been a more enjoyable film. As it was the "we become mortal when we get close" idea was truly awful, no wonder this film had been rejected for over 10 years.
Best avoided as it adds nothing to the superhero film genre, in fact it actually detracts from it.