HANCOCK is a very bad thing

Remember when Will Smith was The Man? Hold on to those memories, because mine are fading fast, replaced by shit like WILD WILD WEST, MEN IN BLACK 2, and the second half of I AM LEGEND. But HANCOCK makes those movies look like INDEPENDENCE DAY.

There's an oh-so-brief moment where you think HANCOCK might be an interesting, reflexive study of the super-hero genre, while also being a ridiculous, balls-out insane study of the super-hero genre. It occurs when our man Will is introduced as the drunk, cynical titular character, as a little kid runs up to show him a crime in progress. Smith essentially tells the kid to screw off, before his guilt makes him fly up, up, and away into a flock of birds. And as you're watching Will Smith flying drunkenly through the city whilst holding a 40 of liquor, spitting out bird feathers as Ludacris' "Move" bumps in the background, you're forced to concede that you've never really seen anything like this before.

Unfortunately, you've seen everything else that happens after this. Almost every choice after this one is hackneyed, obvious work from Smith and director Peter Berg (although Jason Bateman manages to wring a couple laughs out of his normal-guy-trying-to-control-a-superhero shtick). Charlize Theron is wasted, relegated to brooding close-ups so that everyone in the audience can win Guess Who's Got a Secret, and Smith's main choice is to show as little emotion as possible, making Hancock an unknowable, cold force at the heart of the movie.

The script can't decide if it wants to be a doomed love story, a brash comedy, or MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND (as if that was a thing that one would want to emulate), and Berg can't decide if he wants to follow Smith, Theron, or Bateman. Ultimately, it fails at doing any of these things.

Peter Berg's breakthrough was VERY BAD THINGS, a 1998 festival darling but one of the few movies I actively despise. It's a film that hates its own characters with a startling passion, and while I've never seen his follow-up, THE RUNDOWN, which I keep hearing is somehow decent despite the presence of both The Rock and Sean William Scott, his third film, the theatrical version of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, also suffered from an insincerity about it's characters. I didn't mind THE KINGDOM, which avoided some obvious choices, and actually enjoyed the large action setpiece at the end, but its characters were definitely not the focus and were pretty flat. Mr. Berg seems best when he can rely on large explosions and doesn't have to worry about things like human emotion.

And as for Will? I think we should have realized it was all going south when there was no themed music video for "I Robot".