HANCOCK

I think there must be about 30 minutes (or more) of lost footage from Hancock sitting on the floor of an editing bay somewhere, because there seems to be a fairly sizable chunk of this movie missing.

That, or the filmmakers actually set out to tell a sloppy, mediocre superhero story with a completely missed opportunity for greatness and the world’s most inconsequential villain...on purpose.

Will Smith is Hancock, a superhuman whose half-hearted efforts to use his powers for good are consistently hampered by his alcoholism and seriously bad attitude, and they frequently result in mass destruction of property and headaches for the city of Los Angeles. As more than a few characters tell him, he’s an asshole. Enter floundering PR rep Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), who wants to change the world for the better and decides that turning around Hancock’s corroded image will be his new pet project. His wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), is none-too-pleased with the plan, and Hancock himself isn’t entirely sold on the idea.

And here’s where the movie kind of derails, because it can’t quite decide whether it wants to be a redemption tale or a love story or a redemptive love story or just a cookie-cutter action movie about a superhero. Hancock willingly enters prison and promises Ray he will stay put, so that the crime rate in the city can start to climb, the citizens will cry out for help and Hancock can come to the rescue...thereby winning the hearts of the world. The problem is, the only “crime” that appears to be taking place is the filmmakers opting to follow the less interesting of two possible routes from here on out. Instead of pursuing what is so clearly a potentially great plot involving Hancock and Mary, the film hones in on a rather dull and unconvincing bank robber named Red (Eddie Marsan), who is so poorly developed as a character that I had no idea who he was, why he was considered some kind of criminal mastermind, or why I should care about him at all. I suspect a good deal of the answers to my questions can be found in that missing chunk of film I mentioned earlier. Eddie Marsan isn’t exactly an actor who inspires thoughts of “terror” or “abject fear.” More like, “he’s kind of weird-looking and a little creepy.” Not exactly the stuff of which a spectacular summer-movie villain is made.

The risk of spoilers prevents me from saying more about the storyline I’d hoped would be followed, but suffice it to say that Smith and Theron have great onscreen chemistry, and their characters were the two most interesting of the admittedly small cast...so I felt cheated when I didn’t get more of them. And, for me, that unsatiated wanting kind of hampered my overall enjoyment of the movie. Hancock’s history – who he is, what he’s done, how he came to be a veritable derelict – is also ripe for material but left largely unexplored. Too bad.

Choppy story and missed opportunities aside, the other thing that hampered my enjoyment of the movie was the incessant and often needless hand-held camerawork. Honestly, I wish director Peter Berg would learn to embrace – or at least tolerate – a tripod once in a while. Scene after scene were shot hand-held, when the action and the nature of the project (a glossy summer popcorn movie, not a gritty independent drama) didn’t demand or require it. I don’t need jittery, jerky, unsteady shots in, say, a business-meeting scene where everyone’s sitting down around a conference table. Frenetic running around during a bank robbery? Okay. But sitting down to dinner? Not so much.

Overall, Hancock the movie mirrors Hancock the character – it has a great deal of potential and could have been super, but instead chose to rest on its laurels and coast...to its own detriment.