Hancock

Imagine we live in a world where there's an honest to goodness superhero with all those crackin' powers that come with it. A hero that protects us and batters the baddies. Shamefully the closest we've got to that description's ol' Dubya, or Captain Caveman, weakness' include pretzels and an inability to say no to Daddy's mates. In all honesty you'd rather he just left you alone to fend for yourself, thanks to his ability to cock everything up and leave a path of destruction in his wake. Well Hancock's like the fictional Dubya, even down to the drink problem.

It's an intriguing setup at the heart of Hancock. What happens when a superhero hits the skids because his personal life's so shit he turns to that ol' friend booze to sort his problems. And of course that effects his ability to do his job and before you know it he's tossing killer whales into yaughts and flashing his buttocks at children, all the while running up damages totaling hundreds of millions. So when he saves the life of probably the only kind-hearted P.R. man to ever have walked this Earth the move is made to redeem Hancock in the public eye, starting by going to prison for all the damage caused. The thinking behind it is of course that with him away crime rates will soar and everyone will realise they need him.

Hancock's biggest problem is that it doesn't know what to do with such a great idea. Very quickly it descends from superhero send-up into yer actual Hollywood superhero blockbuster, thanks to him sobering up and a big twist that sets the second half of the movie off in another direction altogether. Instead of clever comedy we get mythic back-story and identikit action scenes. It's all directed with a steady hand by Peter Berg and Will Smith and Jason Bateman are excellent but they are all let down by the script. Supposedly Hancock has went through numerous rewrites in the past decade, and yet instead of producing a finely tuned story it's two separate films. The first "movie" offers a lot of potential so it's a great shame that the second "movie" just isn't anything worth seeing. It's like one of those bad TV movies they show in the afternoons on Channel 5 that are really two episodes of a TV show slapped together without any care given to the fact that the two plot-lines don't even fit. If this were the case with Hancock the first half would be the clever, original pilot, the second would come from the middle of Season 4 when lack of viewers made the network move to make it into a generic show so as not to scare the normal folks.

Hancock is the only superhero based blockbuster this summer that's able to claim that it's an original premise, instead of an adaptation. Shamefully by the end you'll feel there's nothing original about it, no matter how much good work has went into the first half.