Starts off well but loses its way (Hancock (DVD))

Member Name: Burning_Darkness

Product:	Hancock (DVD)
Date:	20/09/09 (37 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: solid performance by smith, some funny moments

Disadvantages: weak second half, fairly generic

Hancock stars Will Smith as an emotionally crippled, alcoholic superhero with a serious image problem- whilst he tries to use his powers of flight and impossible strength to aid the people of his native city he always manages to cause immense destruction in the process, and is seen more as a menace than a hero. This anti-hero premise is well done and allows for some very entertaining comedic set-pieces, helped along nicely by Hancock's sharp and ascerbic one-liners and some solid timing and delivery by Smith, whose character is at once genuinely pitiful and darkly humourous, to begin with at least. Smith does a great job of painting Hanckock as a suicidally destructive character living a nihilistic and empty life from one liquor bottle to the next, but when the film actually discloses the reasons for this emptiness they are not nearly enough to justify his crushing misery.

Hancock rescues a charity worker/PR executive named Ray when his car becomes stuck on a railway track, and Ray then takes it upon himself to 'reinvent' Hancock in the eyes of the public, convincing the depressed superhero him to go into prison and rehabilitation in an attempt to make a fresh start. Ray manages to come across as the worst kind of do-gooder however, seeming like little more than a parasite as he uses his association to Hancock to try and get his charity operation off the ground, and I spent most of the film wishing Hancock would come to his senses and smash Ray's head into a billion tiny pieces.

The film is an entertaining mix of comedy, action and emotional drama to begin with, as Hancock struggles to stick with the program whilst occasionally losing it, shoving one prison inmate's head up another's backside on one occasion, but halfway through the film a curveball plotline takes the story in another direction, and it devolves into a more generic superhero film. The cgi special effects are standard Hollywood fare but they get the job done, and in a light-hearted film such as this their lack of realism hardly seems to matter, and Hancock remains a consistently entertaining film, although it remains one that fails to live up to its initial promise. By modern Hollywood's low standards however, it's a fairly enjoyable film.

Summary: decent if unspectacular light entertainment