moviereview - Hancock

HANCOCK

	John Hancock is the super-hero everyone loves to hate. Drunk and inept, he needs a little help making people love him. Enter the public relations manager.	score 2	moviereview rates films from 1 (unwatchable) to 5 (unmissable)
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Cast
Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, Jae Head, Eddie Marsan

Director
Peter Berg

Screenwriter
Vincent Ngo
Vince Gilligan

Country
USA

Rating / Running Time
MA / 92 minutes

Australian Release
July 2008

Official Site

Deep in the heart of this half-cocked apology of an action-comedy drama is a gem of an idea. Hancock is a super-hero who has fallen on hard times. Part Frankenstein, part Superman, he’s a man who just wants to be loved and he could be if he got off the booze, stopped abusing his fans and generally trashing Los Angeles every time he tries to save the day. So how does a despised superhero make people love him? Here’s the gem - enter the Public Relations manager.

Director Peter Berg last insulted our intelligence with the utterly unpleasant exercise in reimagined American foreign policy that was The Kingdom. No stranger to action sequences and on safer ground, or so one would think. Hancock should have been a contender in the blockbuster season. Instead he offers a genre mash-up that manages to give Smith his first box-office dud in just on a decade. Uncertain if the script is two-handed comedy, three-handed drama, action or adventure, he opts to throw all four at the wall in the hope something will stick. Mostly it doesn’t, leaving a big smear across the screen.

Smith and Theron juice up the film in fitful moments (Berg does keep a surprise up his sleeve, albeit one soon squandered), but they can’t hold down a story that is forever lurching in a new and bewildering direction. Add the most frightful and pointless use of queasy-cam ever seen in the cinema (a new category for the Raspberry Awards perhaps?), and Hancock flies straight down the toilet taking two Oscar nominated actors with it.

// COLIN FRASER