REVIEW: Hancock
Like the character that it is named after, “Hancock” tries very hard to do the right thing, but winds up making a terrible mess in the process.
When I first heard about the concept behind “Hancock,” that of a homeless hero trying his best to curb his strength and attitude for the greater good, I was intrigued.
I’ve always felt that superhero movies are not made solely on the basis of special effects, but also on the strength of the characters. What would the Hulk be without Bruce Banner’s pathos? Batman without his tortured past as Bruce Wayne?
The idea of a hero feeling isolated because of his inability to control his strength and attitude seemed like a great opportunity to explore one of the key aspects of superheroes, the feeling of isolation from society.
The first half of the film covers that very well. It’s easy to see how Hancock developed his attitude when he’s surrounded by people more concerned with property destruction than with the lives he’s saved.
Will Smith usually gets “good guy” roles, so it’s nice to see him as a darker character, one who’s burned out, living on the fringes of the society. He does a good job here, and though it isn’t up to the same bar he set in “The Pursuit of Happiness,” he still manages to convey Hancock’s feelings of isolation well.
If the rest of the film had been more of a character study, this would have been a much better movie, but at the midpoint they feel the need to throw in another superhuman, three idiots who think they can take on the strongest man alive, and turn the rest of the movie into a complete disaster, and not in a good “Incredible Hulk” way.
It’s as if the writer came up with a good character, a thoughtful way of approaching his situation, and then just decided, “Hey, I need some more stuff to blow up.” It feels completely contrived, and there were plenty of other, better directions for the source material to go in.
The other low point of Hancock is the camera. My old nemesis, the handheld shaky-cam is back, filling the screen with images that look like they were shot by an over-eager bystander jockeying for a better angle at a bear mauling. Seriously, why do we need this sort of camera work, usually reserved for tense dialogue sequences on shows like “24,” during a PR meeting? There’s nothing exciting there, and no amount of cinematic flailing about is going to make it more interesting than it already is.
Making the film even more unwatchable are a gaggle of sudden, unnecessary zooms. Back at the PR sequence, I was watching a medium reaction shot of an executive looking bored with a pitch he was hearing. All of the sudden, the camera shoots forward, giving us a close up of the same reaction shot we were just looking at. Why, you ask? Because zooms make everything more exciting, silly!
These two factors, combined with a series of faster-than-the-mind-can-follow quick cuts seriously detracted from the excitement.
Thankfully, these problems are kept to a minimum at the scene’s high point, when Hancock foils a bank robbery that the police are helpless to stop. Even though that should help soothe me, all it did was leave me wondering why they couldn’t have kept it this toned down throughout the rest of the movie.
Despite the bad camera and thrown-together story, “Hancock” does have one thing going for it besides Will Smith. The special effects, while not quite up to the caliber of this summer’s blockbuster “Iron Man,” are still impressive. There is an excellent combination of practical effects and CGI that makes it seem as though Hancock is actually capable of all the things the script demands of him. It beats the heck out of the usual “CGI puppet lifting a bus” syndrome that usually creeps into these movies.
In all, Hancock isn’t really a “bad” movie; it’s just a movie that squanders its potential.
Final Verdict: 5/10
