Hancock

With the release of The Dark Knight, 2008's "summer of superheroes" (say that three times fast...in my SLAUGTHERTORIUM!) comes to an end. So far, I've seen a workmanlike superhero movie (The Incredible Hulk), a superhero/Tolkein mashup (Hellboy 2: The Golden Army), an ebullient superhero movie (Iron Man), and a bleak, brilliant superhero movie (The Dark Knight). I realized, though, that I've so far missed the one superhero movie this summer that features an "original" hero with no comic book pedigree. So today I watched Hancock; let's call it the half-baked superhero movie.

I've long wondered why movie studios create their own superheroes rather than exclusively mine comic books for their material. A successful original superhero film would be a potential billion dollar franchise with no need to split the take with DC or Marvel. Hancock helps answer that question: the problem with creating a superhero out of whole cloth is the insurmountable challenge of introducing the movie going public to a brand new character, brand new powers, and a brand new creation myth while still providing your standard rousing action plotting. Hancock struggles with this problem throughout, hinting at a dense back story, but relying on blunt exposition that is at the same time overly explicit and maddeningly vague.

On top of all this, Hancock also tries to do the superhero deconstruction thing. This charges the film with the task of simultaneously building a fully realized superhero world while subverting it at the same time. It's a daunting mission for any filmmaker, not least Peter Berg, the poorer man's Tony Scott. The film fails for the most part, leaving a collection of interesting ideas that never develop or cohere. Every attempt to make sense of the muddy mythology just raises more questions, but not in a "let's deepen the mystery" way, more of a "boy, this is some annoying, scatterbrained mishmash," way.

Ignoring all the silly Hancock-orgin myth shenanigoats, the film asks some interesting questions: how would an all-powerful being deal with the essential isolation of his condition, how would the American public really react to the latent threat of an uncontrollable omnipotence in their midst? Answering these questions lead into some fresh, funny terrain before the film disappears up its own ass in the third act. Will Smith tempers his inherent Will Smithyness with some angst and a slight edge of menace. Jason Batemen is gold as always. Charlize Theron is...tanorexic. I just wish the filmmakers had concentrated their efforts on the stuff that they clearly had a good handle on, like Hancock's struggle to relate respectfully to people who he could kill with a flick of the wrist, rather than trying to tease out a sludgy miasma of character histories and undercooked relationships.

Score: 6.1