Right. Hancock. Big names, budget, decent director, hot genre. Should be a hit, yes? A sure fire money winner? Err, no. sorry. Despite a big cast and the special effects whiz-bang, Hancock never really rises above being just okay because it never really decides what kind of film it wants to be. And releasing within a week of Wanted and Wall-E, a pair of vastly superior films that will play largely to the same audience Hancock covets, being just okay pretty much condemns Hancock to failure.

As you should know by know, Will Smith is the title character, a drunken bum of a superhero known as John Hancock because he can't remember anything about himself, not even his name, before waking up in a hospital eighty years earlier. As a hero he's got everything you could want: he's super strong, invulnerable and can fly. He's the whole package. But as a human being he's a horrible failure, rude, abrasive, and a bit of a misanthrope generally hated by the city he tries to protect thanks to his abusive nature and penchant for smashing stuff up that shouldn't really be smashed.

Hancock's life begins to change when he saves a PR exec, played by Jason Bateman, who decides to repay the favor by rehabbing Hancock's public image, a job he is discouraged from by his wife (Charlize Theron) who clearly has some hidden history with the drunken hero.

Problems? There are lots. Of the cast only Bateman, increasingly becoming one of the most reliable character actors of his generation, really fits the film, with both Theron and Smith feeling a bit out of place throughout. And why might they feel out of place? Maybe because the movie doesn't really know what it wants to be. It starts as an absurd comedy but aiming for a soft rating keeps the film from really exploiting all the possibilities of a chronically drunk hero on screen. It then moves into "man finding his true self" territory when Hancock starts to accept help and tries to better himself, but the rehab of the character is so quick and perfunctory that it ends up being just horribly shallow and false. Abandoning that it moves into a weird fusion of high action and romantic drama, but the action part is never given a really credible villain and the characters are just too paper-thin for the drama to carry any real weight.

Note to the producers: more isn't always better. Sometimes more is just more. Sometimes more is distracting and annoying. This is one of those cases. If you'd narrowed your focus down you would likely have had something a whole lot better here but by trying to cram a bunch of different films into a slender run time you just left Hancock with nothing to do but move from plot point to plot point without giving anybody any reason to particularly care.

Again, Hancock's not horrible, just sort of pleasantly bland and the fact that director Peter Berg isn't able to handle this many competing themes and plot threads successfully makes me very, very afraid for his upcoming adaptation of the ultra-complex and detailed scifi classic Dune.

Published by Goat Boy on behalf of The Tattooed Man