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Supertramp

Will Smith is a not so super anti-hero
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 9th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Car-jacking made easy. If only the film could be lifted up a bit. Will Smith stars.
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Hancock


Directed by Peter Berg
With Will Smith, Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman
John Hancock’s bed is wherever he passes out drunk. Though this trashcomber has rigged up a home out of three defunct Shasta and Airstream trailers out in the desert beyond Los Angeles, Hancock is just as likely to be found flopped on a bus bench cradling his hooch. Yet, as he stumbles through his day, from the late-morning stupor to late-night boozeries, Hancock will occasionally do the odd job, such as stopping highway shootouts by tossing the perps’ cars onto the Capitol Record Building, or flinging stranded whales back out to sea. In the process, he usually ends up wrecking freight trains, destroying office towers and creating epic potholes.
Hancock (Will Smith) is a superhero that no one considers super. In fact, the good people of Los Angeles wish the sodden Brother would take his heroics to another planet. Talking heads rail against him on radio and television, while the average citizen usually greets him with an epithet. This increases Hancock’s feelings of alienation and isolation, which only positive PR might be able to repair.
Enter Ray Emery, a generous schmuck whose attempts at spin are naive at best. After the shambling wreck superhero saves his life, Ray (Jason Bateman) decides to rehabilitate Hancock’s image — which may mean that he’ll spend time behind bars for all the property damage he’s created. Ray’s young son Aaron immediately takes to Hancock, though Ray’s wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), is strangely less receptive. Nonetheless, after Hancock is jailed, the crime levels rocket up in L.A., and the very people who were contemptuous of the supertramp now demand his return. The rehabbed Hancock can at last prove himself.
As summer fare, Hancock is harmless hokum for those primarily seeking air-conditioning above entertainment. As a film, however, it’s a mess, a bag lady’s tote of scraps, dumped and assembled by committee.
There’s a bit too much of Hancock’s profile that’s been lifted from ’70s blaxploitation comic-superhero Luke Cage, aka Power Man, the Harlem crusader (a character finally making his way to the screen in a forthcoming film by John Singleton, starring Tyrese Gibson). There’s also a sour whiff of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s classic Skid Row hero Factwino, who has comically battled the grim forces of the Moral Majority and Armageddonman over a number of years.
The plot is a miniature golf course of bizarre holes — there’s so much that simply doesn’t make sense. Early on, the audience is clued in on the fact that Ray’s wife, Mary, has had some past connection with Hancock, though he, an amnesiac, is unaware of it. We then discover that Mary, too, is a superhero (who possesses X-Men-member Storm’s ability to conjure up tornados), and that she and Hancock were a couple over a 3,000-year period. But their makeup is such that when they are together for long periods of time, they begin to become mortal and lose their powers. If that is so, how have they managed to hold on to their abilities so long after meeting?
Though Mary professes to be more powerful than Hancock, their revealed history together would seem to indicate the opposite. And if a black man and white woman are a couple (however super), why would they risk putting themselves in jeopardy by choosing to live in places like 1930s Miami instead of a more tolerant Paris or Rio?
Director Peter Berg is a devout explosionist, as was seen in his last film, The Kingdom. Nothing fills a story’s holes like a good round of firecrackers. But he’s also a sloppy director. There are a number of irritating errors, the most egregious being that, although Hancock cuts the right hand off of a murderous villain, we next see the fellow in a prison yard sporting a hooked prosthesis on the left.
Smith is allowed his trademarked emotionalism — the welling eyes of an unvoiced pain, the steely glint of discovered pride, etc. Bateman does what he can with the thin character outline he was handed, while Theron, at least, is given a chance to prove she has a strong comic sense. Otherwise, Hancock is all flop.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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