Super fresh: Will Smith leaves behind his comedy for the darker role of John Hancock.

Review

Hancock.

by Sean Burns

Neither fish nor fowl, and obviously not quite finished yet, this perplexing, occasionally rather enjoyable comic book satire finds our last bona fide big-money movie star, Will Smith, wandering fairly far out on a limb—daring his legion of fans to embrace Big Willie as a surly, alcoholic hobo superhero who passes out on park benches and causes more destruction than he prevents.

Smith’s John Hancock flies around Los Angeles drunk all the time, ostensibly fighting crime but mostly just smashing into stuff and cussing his brains out. He’s so despised that when little children see him on the street, they all call him an asshole.

Believe it or not, unlike nearly every other movie in theaters right now, Hancock isn’t based on a comic book. This kooky patchwork of a project was spun from a much heralded, notoriously unfilmable script called Tonight, He Comes, penned by first-timer Vincent Ngo, that surfaced sometime in the ’90s. The double entendre title referred to our hero’s struggle to keep a lid on his libido, a sort of extra-graphic riff on the great Mallrats gag in which Superman can’t screw Lois Lane because his Kryptonian super-spooge will most likely rip her in half.

Heavily rewritten by (among others) freaky X-Files scribe Vince Gilligan plus Batman & Robin writer and menace-to-society Akiva Goldsman, Hancock was at one time or another announced as terribly close to being made by directors as disparate as Michael Mann (who, like Goldsman, stayed onboard as a producer), Breakdown’s Jonathon Mostow and even The Pursuit of Happyness’ Gabrielle Muccino. Mann’s gifted protege Peter Berg finally finished the job, although the final cut feels so truncated, tinkered-with and confused, it’s tough to imagine what this weirdo movie was ever supposed to be in the first place.

Hancock is deeply strange, devoting its entire first half to our dirtbag crusader’s failed, stubbornly unlikable antiheroics. Smith purses his lips into a boozy sneer; he’s incapable of even smiling convincingly.

After begrudgingly saving the life of Jason Bateman’s altruistic publicist, Mr. Hancock receives a crash course in media relations. With a knowing nod to all the awkward ways in which Jerry Maguires of the world must coach their thug athlete clients into feigning graciousness in public, the deliciously deadpan Bateman teaches this ornery souse how to sand down the jagged edges of his personality and to act like … well, like Will Smith. Suddenly he’s the most beloved man in town.

This is a great setup, but unfortunately that’s all they’ve got. A honking left-field whopper of a plot twist prevents me from discussing what exactly goes so wrong with the rest of the flick, but for starters there’s a barely developed villain who’s a total nonstarter, plus an elaborate, convoluted back-story that’s so sketchily and hastily explained, it just sounds like nonsense.

At a scant 92 minutes, Hancock feels like a couple of reels are missing—most of the movie is devoted to establishing our premise, and then we jump immediately to the conclusion without benefit of a second act.

Still, it’s undeniably fun to watch. Peter Berg turned out to be an inspired choice for the director’s chair, as the Friday Night Lights auteur has a rough-and-tumble handheld camera technique that manages to ground such silly, fantastical F/X material within the clear logic of a workaday world. And as in The Pursuit of Happyness and I Am Legend, Smith continues to push against his limitations, slowly but steadily growing into a formidable actor.

A quick sojourn on the Internet can inform you of Hancock’s various incarnations, and all evidence indicates the picture went through an exceptionally brutal testing and editing process before at last arriving in its peculiarly truncated PG-13 form. But make no mistake, the movie’s soul is rated R. The best moments are pushy and abrasive, a little funkier and a lot grittier than one might expect from a movie that, sadly, never really goes anywhere.