Hancocked and Overloaded

Wow, this is a weird one – it's both better and worse than I thought it'd be. Deconstructing superheroes has been happening in comics for a few decades, but it's relatively new to the silver screen. Can Hancock stand up with pioneers like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns or new classics like Astro City or Alias?

Um, no. There are interesting ideas and a promising presence, but a misguided twist and muddled mythos make this movie kind of a mess. Overall a watchable one, but certainly not a complete success. Will Smith plays Hancock – an apathetic, alcoholic superhero with a penchant for doing more harm than good, at least financially. On one of his early escapades, he saves a struggling PR exec (Jason Bateman, channeling kind of a combo of his dad roles from both Arrested Development and Juno) who decides to help rehabilitate the hated hero.

Smart concept, but after the initially fun scenes of Hancock's destructive heroics, the way it plays out drifts toward dumb. Faced with a series of summons and debt mounting in the millions, Hancock takes responsibility for his actions by agreeing to incarceration. It's part of the PR plan – prove to the public that he's willing to change and wait for them to need a hero again. And it works, as he answers the call a kindler, gentler (if somewhat more awkward) spin on Superman... until about the middle of the movie.

I'll avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that both Hancock's origin story and rogues gallery are weak at best. At worst, they make little to no sense and seem crammed in from an earlier treatment. At just over an hour and a half, the flick's sailing along at a nice little clip, takes a bizarre left turn that plays havoc with the plotting and pacing – and never truly recovers. It's a jarring shift in tone and storytelling that left me staring at the screen, wondering if I fell asleep and missed some crucial scene. There are a couple nice moments that wrap up the movie, but they don't hold up to more than a second's thought. Maybe a half second.

So what starts as a smartass satire of sorts turns into a fairly bizarre headscratcher. I mentioned it's better and worse than I thought – it doesn't deserve the blisteringly bad reviews it's getting, but it almost runs completely off the rails in ways you weren't envisioning. Is it worth seeing? I'll give it a light yes. Will Smith's good, Jason Bateman's funny and Charlize Theron is... um... hot. But you can prolly wait 'til DVD, particularly if you're not crazy about shakycam. Director Peter Berg takes his style from Friday Night Lights and overplays his handheld visuals a tad – so combine that with a sorta hit-and-miss movie and it might be more of a Netflixer.