John Hancock (Will Smith) is not beloved by the people he has sworn to protect. The alcoholic, virtually homeless superhero is as surly and as belligerent as the majority of the criminals he apprehends, and the amount of damage he tends to cause while executing his fantastical deeds has produced, not applause, but a warrant for his immediate arrest.

Disgruntled superhero Hancock (Will Smith) and PR exec Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) meet for the first time in Columbia Pictures' Hancock

After this dingy man of brawn saves his life, public relations expert Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) decides to put his career on the line and rehabilitate the public’s views towards their wannabe protector. While everything goes fine at first, Hancock even taking his new advisor’s advice to turn himself into the police and spend a few nights in jail, the ad man’s wife Mary (Charlize Theron) isn’t at all sure her husband is doing the right thing. But the pair’s son Aaron (Jae Head) adores the guy, and even if the rest of the city thinks he’s a menace as far as thins kid’s concerned he’ll always be a hero.

I’ll leave the synopsis there for now, going any further might ruin the quote-quote “surprise” Columbia Pictures and director Peter Berg (The Kingdom) have gone out of their way to try and keep secret. Let’s just say nothing is as it seems in the new action-comedy Hancock, and no matter what can be said about the picture as a whole one does have to admit the marketing team behind it did one heck of a fine job.

Good thing, because without their hard work of inventive slight of hand they would have had to sell the movie on its merits. Considering it ends up not having very many that probably would have proven to be an incredibly difficult thing to do. The basic truth everyone should know here is that, for all its savvy and slick promises otherwise, Hancock is an empty, ill-plotted and highly vulgar disaster that’s going to disappoint virtually everyone who takes the time to see it.

Pity, because there are the making for a superb motion picture here. More, the darn thing opens incredibly well, the opening minutes of the film so engagingly off-the-wall and intriguing I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. Smith’s John Hancock is the type of ill-mannered anti-hero a person could really get a kick out of, and by the time he’s left a car full of foul-mouthed thugs stranded in their impaled car atop the Capitol Records building I was just about certain this thing was going to become an instant classic.

Unfortunately, instead of taking their highly adult superhero with an attitude problem (think Snake Plisken but with superpowers) into the stratosphere, writers Vy Vincent Ngo (Hostage) and Vince Gilligan (Wilder Napalm) suddenly turn their film into an episode of Dr. Phil complete with long-lost love affairs and Freudian wanderings so asinine even he might find them silly. What could have been a live action knockoff of The Incredibles becomes instead a pale My Super Ex-Girlfriend clone, and by the time it was over I felt so pummeled and verbally abused I was thankful I survived.

Don’t blame the actors. All of them are fine (especially Bateman, the man stealing just about every scene he’s in), Smith and Theron actually sharing a decent bit of fiery chemistry that maybe could have meant something had the film knew exactly what it should do with it. It’s the script that lets them down, and how any of them didn’t know going in that both the second and third acts had significant problems is way beyond me.

Berg is a good director, both Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom solid pieces of genre entertainment worthy of considerable applause, but he doesn’t have the first clue what to do with this mess. There is an awful lot of mayhem and destruction serving no real purpose, and while some scenes sparkle with giddily wonderful inspiration (love the bit where Hancock tries to say, “Good job” to a bunch of heavily under-fire police officers), the majority reeks of desperation attempted to be concealed by way too much explosive CGI overkill. 

I’m probably not the first to say it, but what Hancock reminded me the most of was Arnold Schwarzenegger and director John McTiernan’s 1993 action catastrophe The Last Action Hero. Like that messy dog of disaster, this one hasn’t the first clue what it is, who its audience is or what it wants to do with itself. Is it a comedy? Is it an action film? Is it some sort of weirdly hyper-violent (and verbally abusive) satire? I don’t know, and neither do the filmmakers, and after a big first weekend I fully anticipate this is one superhero whose going to disappear so fast people might not even remember he was here in the first place.

Film Rating: ê1/2  (out of 4)

Additional Links

-  Hancock Theatrical Trailer