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DokBrowne [ 5.5 ]
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I always hope for the best from a Will Smith movie, but they so often turn out mediocre. Problem is he's too big a star that the projects he's involved in are inevitably tampered with by billions of sources in order to assure maximum demographic exposure or whatever else studio execs think they're doing to increase box office. They end up homogenized in the end. This is a weird film by nature - not only is the main character supposed to be loathsome in a way, but the guy they ultimately hired to direct it (Peter Berg) has an off-kilter, vaguely unpleasant style (I guess the studio only saw "The Rundown" and "The Kingdom", not "Very Bad Things") that doesn't quite match the glossy, crowd-pleasing demands of a typical summer blockbuster. As a result, the movie seems unfocused and almost more suited to an indie production than a big season tentpole. Not that it's edgy by any means - any notion of it grinding against cliches with its backwards premise are wiped away about 20 minutes in when Smith is all but reformed and the central gimmick (Superman is an asshole) slowly fades away.
Nothing wrong with genre blending; arguably the best, most memorable films are those that don't adhere to one specific classification. Good for "Hancock" for not being merely an action-comedy, but it doesn't really satisfy in any of its goals, unfortunately. The action and effects are minimal (there's not even a real villain, nor by proxy a big climax), the comedy toned-down (for an asshole, Hancock isn't all that bad. The script was obviously more concerned with his heroic origins and redemption than confronting this potentially intriguing idea of a douche bag hero. Even the similarly mixed-bag 1992 Dustin Hoffman "Hero" carried this premise further), and the drama too bombastic (the impressive yet raging musical score during all the serious scenes didn't help any).
And that's not even addressing the borderline atrocious second half of the movie, which suffers from both a freefall in inspiration (with the main conflict solved, the screenplay starts inventing crazy story bits every few minutes to sustain itself for a full length) and a forehead-slappingly stupid "twist" involving one character that's dreadfully obvious from the very beginning and makes no sense. It's a lame coincidence, an annoyingly convenient way to wrap character development together, an ill-defined concept in and of itself (wait, so how exactly did it all begin? What are the rules here?), and screws with the story's established universe too much to eventually try going back to normal like it does.
The bottom line, though, is that the movie is reasonably entertaining, if only for the characters themselves and its overall digestible breeziness (even despite the melodrama). The jokes play it way too safe (even the supposedly nasty ones), but Smith is reliably charismatic (although, characteristic of his recent string of roles, here the serious side of his performance proves far more effective than the comic) and Jason Bateman evolves into the heart of the story by the end, to the extent that I think the movie could've been a lot better had it shifted its focus more directly to him than Hancock. There's definitely a good movie underneath the rubble of cookie-cutter compromises, strained, illogical plot developments, and atonal mishmashing, but it probably involves leading up to Bateman becoming the real hero (something that's toyed with but he's still merely shoehorned into the finale), re-thinking Hancock's silly superhero details, and either using the jerk-protagonist motif all the way or not at all.
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jeff_v [ 6.0 ]
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Give this movie a different director and I think you might have a franchise. Will Smith and Charlize Theron are good, but can't quite transcend the noisy and obtrusive style that interferes with the emotional currents. If the movie were a little funnier, or a little more serious, it could have been a success, but it got trapped in no-man's land.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.2 |
| No. Ratings | : 3 | |
| No. Reviews | : 2 | |
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