Hancock
“Hancock” tries to be a different sort of superhero movie. Starring Will Smith as a misanthropic, alcoholic humanoid being with godlike powers, it promises a galvanizing mix of subversive humor and crowd-pleasing spectacle. Smith plays an unrepentant jerk with energy and conviction while keeping the audience on Hancock’s side. But he can’t lighten the touch of director Peter Berg. “Hancock” is supernatural and super-serious. Occasionally Berg throws in a genuinely funny scene or a wildly off-the-mark stab at broad humor. More often, though, he directs the movie like an episode of his acclaimed TV melodrama “Friday Night Lights” — shooting angsty close-ups with a handheld camera, cutting them together raggedly and setting it all to mournful, atonal music. As in his previous movie, “The Kingdom,” Berg comes off as overwrought and desperate, trying to impose on the material an intimacy that the writing can’t support. The screenplay is a mess, too. There are only three major roles: Besides Smith, we get Jason Bateman as a PR executive who tries to rehabilitate Hancock’s image and Charlize Theron as Bateman’s steadfast wife. Yet the movie can’t persuasively sow conflict between these three good guys or reconcile them against a common foe. It hints at an elaborate mythology that it never explains, and eventually Berg just gives up and turns on the tears and the rain machines. “Hancock” drowns in self-importance.
LISTEN: Hancock