Hancock must have sounded great - at least on paper. Hancock (Smith) is the anti-superhero, a crime fighter with a bad attitude in contemporary Los Angeles who drinks way too much, dresses like skid row and doesn't give a hoot what anyone thinks about him. Of course, since he can fly like Superman, stop a speeding train with his fist and take care of just about any gang member with his little finger, he is invaluable to the police. But the public hates him - so into his life comes PR wizard Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), who is determined to remake Hancock into the image of a hero the city can embrace, including getting a spandex outfit. When Hancock comes over to Embrey's house, his wife Mary (Charlize Theron) gets an immediate bad vibe about the guy. There's good reason and therein lies the film's big twist, which comes at the half-way point of the very tight 92-minute running time. To say much else about where the plot goes would put us in spoiler hell and for a movie so reliant on the sudden turn it takes you'll just have to figure it out yourself.
Actor-turned-director Peter Berg is all flash and style with Hancock. He moves his shaky camera right up into the stars faces and back again, awkwardly shifting the tone from comedy to maudlin drama and trying to ramp up a story that just doesn't make a whole lot of narrative sense. Films about comic-book superheroes are a dime a dozen in the summer months, and audiences have shown they can easily suspend disbelief if they have a protagonist to root for. Berg's failure here is to present Will Smith in such a way that we don't care. Even though there are some nice special effects and its faults do not lie in our stars (we still love you, Will), Hancock does not live up to the hype.
