Image: Henry Farrar-Hockley
The summer blockbuster season rolls on with the release of Will Smith’s anti-superhero movie, Hancock, on July 2. Here’s our review.
Will Smith is a fascinating character. He pretty much heads the list of Hollywood’s A-list megastars; bagging 20 million a movie, ranging across genres from comedy to action to rom-com (and winning big every time), while steering clear of bloated franchises (he’s done sequels, but ‘threequels’? Not yet, at least).
He’s a hugely charismatic onscreen presence in the mould of Tom Cruise, and yet, unlike Cruise, he’s no blank canvas. He exudes personality, oozes life: who else could have carried I Am Legend on their own shoulders?. When was the last time you saw him share credit with a co-star? Bad Boys 2? And that was a knowing joke.
But if Will Smith isn’t exactly resting on his laurels, it’s hard to know what kind of actor he wants to be. He dipped his toe in a couple of Serious Films at the turn of the century, but after they didn’t work out, it’s been fat pay cheques and big trailers all the way. But there’s always been a glimmer of hope with Smith. Even when sticking to the tent pole summer events, he’s toyed with the idea of good taste – channelling Asimov, Mark Protosevich and a true-life tear-jerker, where other stars simply stretched themselves in spandex. So even if the results weren’t always happy (and to be honest, they rarely were) Smith usually managed to come out of it all unscathed.
All of which brings us to Hancock, in which Smith finally tackles the superhero genre, but with his own idiosyncratic twist. Based on a script that’s been kicking around Hollywood for ages, Hancock’s time has finally come. Sandwiched between summers ruled by Superman, Batman, X-Men and more, John Hancock is the anti-superhero; a hard-drinking misfit, a loner, a loser, who tackles crime in LA with maximum prejudice and minimum regard for life, limb and property. When the disgruntled citizens finally snap, it’s up to Jason Bateman’s PR maven to guide Hancock’s rehabilitation and, inadvertently, lead him to his destiny.
Hancock is, without a doubt, the strangest movie of the summer. At its core is a story of a superhero without a nemesis – a superhero whose worst enemy turns out to be his own nature. You can be immortal, you can have the strength to crush trains with your shoulder, but how do you fight that? What kind of choices would you make, Hancock asks, if you emerged from a painful sense of solitary confinement only to find, after all those years, that the one thing that can help you understand yourself is the one thing that can also destroy you?
While there are other ideas artfully lifted from other comic book films (the question of how people would really react to superheroes in their lives comes from The Incredibles via Watchmen), this central, psychological conundrum is Hancock’s own. He most certainly isn’t the first superhero to show a psychological imbalance (the genre is pretty much founded on that) but he is the first to deal with this peculiar self-reflexivity.
But if Hancock makes some sort of sense on an inner level, externally, Peter Berg’s direction is all over the place. It’s hard to believe that this is the same man who brought such compelling urgency to The Kingdom (a film whose problems are a mirror image of Hancock: rotten on the inside, brilliant on the outside). There’s no authorial voice in Hancock at all, just showy, swirling camerawork and pointless slow-mo – the conceits of a man totally unsure of what kind of film he’s trying to bring to the screen. Likewise, the script flits between foul-mouthed one liners and setting up Hancock as a surrogate father figure to the obligatory cute kid, apparently caught between R-rated action and a family-friendly mentality.
The shots of Smith taking off and landing are excellent, but all the flying effects are hopeless, as is the film’s entire big-money sequence: an extended fight across LA.
By this point we’re into the film’s second half, where things have started to go seriously awry. It begins with a proper jaw-dropper of a twist that you won’t see coming. But after you’ve got over the shock factor, you realise that Hancock has just headed off down a blind alley. The Twist necessitates all manner of exposition that cheapens the character of Hancock himself, and diverts attention away from what was original, to what is formulaic and confused. Worst of all, the film had established its rules of reality, rules which it now goes on to bend and ultimately break in the name of dramatic expediency.
At 92-minutes, Hancock betrays the evidence of being a longer, more complex film cut by committee to leave something more easily marketable but less easily digestible. Is it genre-bending fantasy? Is it adult fiction? Is it foul-mouthed comedy? Is it simple summer fare? It’s none of these things to any satisfying degree, settling, in the end, for being a Will Smith movie, as before, as ever, but not with the conviction and clarity that we’d usually expect from that. The real victim (audience aside) is Eddie Marsan, whose role as a nominal ‘villain’ has clearly been butchered, leaving him flopping around like a stranded fish.
So Hancock, when all is said and done, isn’t a complete failure, but it’s a long, long way from being any kind of success. It has ideas, at least, although not all of them good, and not many of them well executed. One thing’s for sure, though: Will Smith will abide.
