Tonight He Comes (Hancocks original, rather humourous, title) is one of the best unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood.
And it should have stayed that way.
Hancock is a superhero film with a difference. The (genuinely clever) conceit is that the protagonist is an amnesia stricken, homeless, mannerless, alchoholic superman clone who is drawn to help people but often manages to cause more damage than he avoids. With personal property damage in his adopted town of Los Angeles spiralling into the tens of millions, Hancock is more of a liability than a defender of 'Truth, Justice and the American Way'. This neat inversion on the standard story works very well, at least for the first act.
Will Smith, as the titular character, flies around drunk, crashes into buildings, destroys fleets of police cars, derails a train and abuses the locals – all in the first 10 minutes. This serves to introduce the initial plot of the movie:Hancock is, according to our definitions, a superhero but he is more or less hated by the regular inhabitants of the city. This is an interesting perspective on the superhero character (though not entirely unique – Spiderman for example has a long history of being presented as martyr and menace) but it is dropped into our laps far too quickly. There is no sense of how this world functions, how day to day life continues with a super strong, inebriated idiot roaming the skies. He has lived in the city for years, so where is the damage? What encouragement is there for us to believe in this world? Yes I know it’s a superhero movie, disbelief is part of the contract between the filmmakers and the audience, but we still need to be enveloped by the internal, fictional reality of a movie world.
The whole film is stricken with a kind of PG-13 Tourette’s. The populace of Las Angeles seem intent on being rude but their lexicon of bad language is less well developed than the average six year old. I understand that it is partly a rating issue (the one use of the f-bomb here is relatively effective in the offhand way its tossed out) but surely someone could have thought of a number of less offensive swear words? I’ve never heard the word asshole used so many times, and to so little effect. It makes Smiths reaction to the word all the more laughable and unmotivated. He should be responding to the hate of the public, not to a particular word and placing the focus of his rage on a couple of syllables is just another example of the films lack of depth.
whats worse is I really thought this trailer had promise...
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