Kind of Weird  But OK.

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2008)

Hancock, Will Smith's latest offering, is kind of OK-ish but should have been a lot better. Perhaps the best thing I can say about it, is that it wasn't in the least what I was expecting, and I do like to be surprised by a film. But the writers/producers try to throw everything in there to appeal to a broad base, and essentially leave us with a movie that doesn't quite know what it is. The premise is reasonably original and the first half is fairly entertaining, in a brain dead, Friday night sort of way.
Hancock is a flawed hero. Badly flawed. A drunk and a bad boy, his super hero antics (rounding up criminals, rescuing damsels in distress) tend to leave a trail of expensive destruction in their wake, and after rescuing the damsel, chances are he'll grope her. To put it bluntly, Hancock is not a very nice guy at all. The rescue of a down on his luck PR man Ray, (Jason Bateman  who for me was the best thing in Juno) leads Hancock to clean up his act. Ray is stuck on a level crossing with a freight train bearing down on him. Hancock slams into the engine, stopping it in its tracks and we get a rather effective shot of the freight cars piling up like spilled dominoes behind them. The public start to berate Hancock for the mess he's made, while Ray defends him "Hey! This guy just saved my life!"
Ray takes him home to meet his family, an adoring son and a beautiful wife (Charlize Theron) who is surprisingly cagey given that Hancock has just saved her man, then Ray persuades Hancock to improve his public image, first of all by doing the jail time he's been evading (for some of his more egregious acts of superhero-dom) and Hancock slopes off obediently to the state penitentiary where he finds himself alongside some of the very guys he helped put away. As you can imagine, he's not popular. He comes out with much improved people skills and a politically correct agenda. So far so good. But the movie can't quite decide what it wants to be after that; a comedy about a superhero dealing with jail and its aftermath (there is a semi comic scene where he assures an injured female police officer that his touching her is totally non sexual, before rescuing her from a gun battle) or a quasi profound examination of the role of heroes in society through the ages.
If I'd been the writers, I'd have stuck with the first option, which had many unexplored opportunities for comedy. Instead they try to make Hancock more 'meaningful' by introducing Charlize Theron as his female opposite number, and then explore a 'can't live with her, can't live without her' theme which seems to suggest that our superheroes are some kind of fundamental particles of opposite charge which cancel each other out and die when they are in close proximity.
Theron's super heroine has dealt with the loneliness of the long distance super hero by doing what any good girly does in the circumstances; finding a nice safe man (Ray) and helping him chose diapers. A so much more valuable use of her time than, say, rounding up drug cartels or refreezing the melting polar ice caps. Ahhhh! The satisfaction of domestic bliss! All humour is gone by the end and for the finale there's a spectacular and bloody gun battle in a hospital before the baddies get their come-uppance which I guess is what we really need from a super hero movie.
It was OK. But I get the feeling that Will Smith could do better. I like the guy. He has a much better movie than Hancock in him.