Warning: the following review will contain potentially offensive language, as well as major plot spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.
I am going to make a prediction. When Will Smith´s "Hancock" opens on July 2, it will make close to $100 million during the July 4th holiday, thus further cementing Smith´s reputation as Mr. Independence Day. It is nowhere near as imaginative as "Men in Black" or as wildly entertaining as "Independence Day." Forget about being a tour de force like "Ali" or even as emotionally gripping (as some people found it) as "The Pursuit of Happyness." So what is it? Stale. Vapid. Hollow. Offensive. Fluff.
Hancock (Smith) is a super man. He can fly, is impervious to harm and has the strength of…well, you get the idea. But he has a problem: his public image. It seems as though every time he saves someone, he inadvertently causes a great deal of damage to Los Angeles. So PR man Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) decides his personal cause is to remake Hancock into a crowd pleaser. To that end, Hancock turns himself into the police department for the damage he´s caused, prompting a swift about face for the character.
It´s not that Smith, Bateman or Charlize Theron are particularly bad in their roles. Quite the contrary, actually. They keep the movie afloat when the tone radically shifts in the last half hour, jettisoning the comedy for a pseudo-socially conscious ending which doesn´t benefit what has come before it. It is the actors who bring life to a banal and standard script, seemingly thrown together from various pieces of other superheroes (think Superman, Batman and the like). It is the actors-particularly Bateman-we want to find a way out of this mess, not as their characters, but as their real life selves. They don´t deserve this film. Really, no one does.
Why Bateman? He turns into the soul of the movie, the only person we can truly root for. He's the man who makes us laugh and becomes a surrogate for the audience. Ray has a pie in the sky dream, never waivers in trying to achieve it and comes off as Hancock's guardian angel of sorts. The character is given a couple worthwhile scenes-all comedic in nature-and though he isn't at the root of the problems, one man can't save the film alone. A brief mention of Theron as Ray's wife Mary: never has an Oscar winner of her caliber been given so minuscule a role the audience can't build any sense of emotion about the character. The delivery is rather plain; I'm not blaming her, exactly, since the script gives Mary nothing to do for a majority of the running time. Anyone could have filled this role. Why Theron? Her name isn't used in promoting the movie. She doesn't figure prominently in the trailers. And if you're not going to allow an actress to, well, act, what's the point in using her?
Coming off of last winter´s "I am Legend," it´s almost as if writers Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan (and director Peter Berg and producer/star Smith) wanted to see how far they can take the Hancock character into oafish offensiveness before pulling him back to respectability. Robert Neville in "Legend" had our sympathy from the beginning, as did Chris Gardner ("Happyness") and every other on screen personae he´s donned. So it´s this one-where he calls bystanders pricks, drinks himself into oblivion, doesn´t care about anyone but himself-which is the scourge of the earth. And he does it well, with a sneer, upturned lip, squinty eyes and a measured way of speaking early on.
But then there´s a seedy underside to the character and movie, one that is quite ugly, socially inept and offensive. It manifests itself twice, both fairly early on in the production. In one, Hancock rips the back roof of a getaway vehicle off on the highway, revealing three Latino men inside. With the police in hot pursuit, Hancock proceeds to joke with them about three guys in a car by themselves without a girl in sight. The insinuation is that they are gay. (Sidenote: the assumption by Hancock should be to find males in the truck. After all, according to California statistics for 2006, male arrestees outnumber female arrestees 79.8% to 20.2%. So why, exactly, is Hancock so stunned to find three guys together in the getaway car?) A few scenes later, Ray holds up three comic book covers, all white men in standard comic character outfits. The first words which come out of Hancock´s mouth?
Homo. Homo. Norwegian homo.
Now, I wonder, had Black Vulcan, Black Panther, Vixen, Nick Fury, Blade, Storm or any of the dozens of other African American superheroes been on those covers, would Hancock have called them "Nigger; nigger; female nigger?" I´d venture no because those words would have been offensive to one of Smith´s target audiences, African Americans. Besides the box office considerations, Smith would have found their use offensive in the finished film, especially considering our current political landscape. Then explain to me why it's not alright to use a slur for African Americans, but perfectly acceptable to do so for the gays? Sure, it goes to forming the uncouth, disrespectful and altogether rude character he plays. That much I can understand. Yet he doesn´t call the Latino men early in the film Spic; he doesn´t go after men he meets in jail with whitey or cracker or wigger. The only slur he uses happens to be "homo."
We´re given a shoestring plot on which to hang the effects and action sequences. There remains no credible character arc for Hancock; he simply moves from one plot point to another, lacking the bridge scenes we need to get from Point A to Point B. I can imagine the writers having note cards on a wall with major plot points and not having a solid way of connecting them. So they simply tried to mash them together, expecting the audience to fill in the blanks. Hancock's backstory comes far too late to make a difference in the the character. Ideally, it would be the lynch pin in understanding his bad attitude and callousness from the first frame. When does the origin story come in "Superman: The Movie" or Tim Burton's "Batman"? It's the first thing we see in order to flesh out a character and provide detail into his life. Flashback, montage...the script needs to allow us to understand him before he opens his mouth.
You´ve seen the trailers featuring special effects so I won´t insult your intelligence. Just think Superman and you´ll be fine. The extent of the dramatic tension comes in an eleventh hour revelation by Mary, a unimportant character up until an after-dinner scene, is innocuous and rarely used. In that scene, we can feel the entire plot lurch forward, as if someone figured out there is no human threat for Hancock and, thus, no conflict worthy of a summer film. Not the men he puts in jail-and whom subsequently escape FAR too easy. Not the police who act like nitwits when he jumps a fence to retrieve a basketball. (What, exactly, will the guards do to a man who can fly and can´t be hurt if he chooses not to come back? Issue another useless warrant?)
This isn´t a problem of length; clocking in at 92 minutes, "Hancock" feels far longer, as if the screenplay is simply biding time until the grand finale. Of which, let me just say how little sense it actually makes. Working under the theory Mary and Hancock were brother and sister…or lovers…or whatever since the beginning of time and had been attacked all along the way (unspoken racism, we´re meant to infer…how socially conscious) and, by bringing them together, their powers and immortality go out the window, a hospital is attacked by the three escaped prisoners. Disregard the fact all hospitals have security of some kind. And their faces are plastered on television sets. And they just waltz in as if they owned the world.
Never mind in the entire fight, not one security guard shows up. Forget, after Hancock has the crap kicked out of him and Mary is supposedly dead, simply jumping out the window and starting to run down the street is enough space for them both to recover. If this is the case, stay on opposite sides of Los Angeles and everyone lives happily ever after. Ah! But we can´t have that. Hancock must leave the only friends or family he has in order to generate sympathy from the audience. Another scene of losing people he cares about, a reason for us to care. By the end of the film, we don´t care. Not about Hancock. Not about Mary. Not Ray. None of them.
Should I even delve into the logic concerns I had? Throwing a child up in the air a couple miles and then catching him by the chest? That should have caused some internal damage, if not death, from suddenly stopping. How about Hancock, in the end, being hurt by a knife and gunshots and yet, when he jumps out the (at least third story) window and directly onto the top of a bus, he´s just fine? Does Hancock not understand Mary, who has thrown him through a wall, can´t be hurt by a barbeque fork, rolling pin or two pans hitting her in the head? And if Mary, in one of her little fits, demands Hancock keep her nature to himself under penalty of death, why in the world does she attack him in broad daylight in the middle of the street?
Then there´s the little matter of product placement. Oh, how "Hancock" adores product placement. From Ray Ban sunglasses (mentioned by name!) to a cooler full of Coca-Cola with every single label facing outward in a convenience store to FedEx boxes in the background and Jiffy Pop in his trailer, an ad for the Showtime series "Dexter" in the background, gratuitous YouTube plugs, a Sony VAIO computer and Nancy Grace of Headline News making a cameo, it turns into a game. It might be the most fun you´ll have in the movie.
"Hancock," needless to say, is a massive disappointment no matter where you turn, save Bateman and what Smith is able to do. The story hangs between three major action sequences like skin on a decomposing skeleton. Director Peter Berg can´t cover any of the script deficiencies…and the opening sequence is so herky-jerky it´s impossible to get a handle on what´s happening. The effects are alright, though even they bring to mind "Spider-Man" and "Superman." And that´s the ultimate problem: "Hancock" is a mish-mash of every superhero we´ve seen before. A little of this, a dash of that. Create a character, not a pastiche of our best loved protectors in tights. It rates a 3 out of 10. And I´m not even sure