Movie Review: 'Hancock'

Hollywood high concept movies are all about suspending your disbelief (umm… giant alien transforming robots battling it out for the survival of mankind; err… dinosaurs brought out of extinction as theme park attractions). Of course, imagining Will Smith as a superhero living amongst us mere mortals is one of the easier ones to believe.

This is the focus for Hancock, Smith's latest big screen outing. Hancock, however, is a superpowered human being with a difference: caustic, carnage-causing and, mostly, drunk, Hancock is less of a help, more of a hindrance for the citizens of L.A. And now they've had enough of his erroneous ways, booing and heckling him whenever he flies in to lend a helping hand.

But when he saves PR exec Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman, again playing his now patented neurotic nice guy) from a sticky end, Ray takes an interest in turning Hancock's unpopularity around. Before he can win over the general public though, Hancock first has to overcome his biggest foe yet – Ray's pessimistic missus, Mary (an Amazonian Charlize Theron).

A film that's existed in script form (as Tonight, He Comes) for over a decade, Hancock the finished film bears all the hallmarks of screenplay rewrites and studio interference. Beginning as a genuinely funny, consistently laugh-out-loud comedy for its first two-thirds, it takes a sharp and surprising turn into dramatic and (a little enforced) philosophical and mythological matters during its closing act.

Jarring and sitting ill at ease with what's come before, it's a shame that the film loses focus because the dramatic guff is perfectly good on its own merits and would be great in another movie; its just that with its introduction we lose the innovative funnies that earlier make it a cut above the rest.

What makes Hancock's rib-ticklers so amusing and so distressing to lose is the strikingly different headlining role for the normally clean-cut Smith (read: potty mouthed) and his delightfully prickly performance. A womanising, abusive alcoholic with little regard for others, Hancock fires off acerbic yet slurred zingers at a superhuman rate, before he tries to reform and becomes super overly-polite (but no less side-splitting). Between Ali , The Pursuit of Happyness, I Am Legend and this, Smith is showing so many previously unseen sides to him and proving over and over that his acting range goes well beyond the WillSmithian wisecracker with which he made his household name.

Excellent for an hour with a few entertaining action set-pieces and some guaranteed laughs, Hancock has exactly what you'd want and expect from a Will Smith summer vehicle. Just don't be too disappointed by the change in pace and later reliance on plot contrivance over innovative wit.

Three stars