STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2008
STARRING: Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, and Eddie Marsan
WRITTEN BY: Vy Vincent Ngo & Vince Gilligan
DIRECTED BY: Peter Berg
GENRE: Comedy/Action
RATING: PG-13

You may have just heard about it recently, but Hancock has been floating around the Hollywood machine for years. It very nearly went before the cameras with Michael Mann directing and under the title Tonight, He Comes. It's been one of those "great unproduced screenplays" for years. The problem with a lot of screenplays that roll around tinseltown for years? They start to gather moss. There's still something original and almost brilliant in Hancock but it's been buried by so many years of script tinkering and different cooks in the kitchen that it's become a glorious mess. Hancock is a film that starts off promisingly, but takes a left turn about halfway through and literally comes apart at the seams. You can see the air come out of the balloon, until the climax has left you completely deflated, marveling at the mess and wondering what could have been in any of the alternate universe versions of Hancock.

The set-up for Hancock is pretty brilliant and easily summarized - a superhero with an image crisis. If director Peter Berg and writers Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan had stuck to that set-up and followed it through to a logical conclusion, they could have had a slice of summer escapist pie. In case you haven't seen a movie this year (because if you have, you've probably seen the Hancock preview), Will Smith plays the title character, an impervious superhero who likes to drink and blazes a path of destruction as he saves the day. We meet Hancock as he drunkenly sleeps on a park bench and needs to be woken by a kid to be told to go stop the bad guys. This ain't Clark Kent. Hancock saves the life of Ray (Jason Bateman), a too-nice-to-be-true PR agent who offers to help the hero reform his bad boy image. After an arrest warrant is actually put out for Hancock's arrest, his publicity agent decides that step one in his new image is to do some hard time. Of course, crime goes up and we realize that we all need Hancock, bottle of booze in hand or not. The first act of Hancock works. Smith is his typically charming self and there may be no one in movies that I root for more than Jason Bateman. The people who will tell you they like Hancock like the first act, maybe even the first two, but...

About halfway through is where you expect Hancock to develop a villain, maybe someone who knows Hancock's one weakness or possibly even someone who kills Ray or his hot wife (Charlize Theron), the only people that have ever gotten close to the hero. But Hancock shoots for the stars and becomes a completely different movie, a darker, more dramatic, and totally weird film. Or does it? I have a suspicion that what Hancock becomes, which is much more serious in tone, was what first attracted people to this project and that when Will Smith and Peter Berg came on board, the action movie elements had to be played up, which led to the lighter first act. The problem is that, judged as an action movie, Hancock is a complete mess. Berg isn't the right fit for the material and that's coming from a critic who has defended his The Rundown and The Kingdom. Berg chooses to shoot most of the film in extreme close-up with handheld cameras. Great for The Kingdom. Not-so-great for a summer tentpole, superhero movie.

And when Hancock goes off the rails story-wise and becomes several movies at once, Berg can't rein it back in. He lets what could be called a ridiculously ambitious project get completely away from him and the whole film literally falls apart before your eyes. The final act of Hancock is full of revelatory, movie-changing monologues that culminate in a downright embarrassing climax. The problem is simple - Hancock's twist comes so out of left field that the dramatic weight that it's required to give to the climax is not there for the audience. It hasn't been built up. The emotions haven't been earned. And neither has the cookie cutter villain. Hancock should be about subverting expectations. The hero is not who you think it is and real heroes could be right in front of our eyes. There's a great movie buried in that idea, but it's not a cluttered mess. And it's not Hancock.