I had mixed feelings about Will Smith’s Hancock when I saw the first previews-it looked like a comedy about homeless superhero. And for the first part of Hancock, it is a comedy about a homeless superhero. This Will Smith movie shows us a superhero without a Fortress of Solitude-he lives in a ratty mobile home, who hates kids-he tosses one into the sky and seems to debate with whether or not he should catch him again, and no one appreciates him, being around at all-everyone in L.A. would like it if he would move to New York. This is fun stuff.
The last new Will Smith movie I watched was I Am Legend-a remake that didn’t need to be remade. That was an interesting movie, but it was ruined for me by the really, really bad CGI. The CGI in Hancock is not bad until close to the end when a group of shockingly fake looking tornadoes make a thankfully brief appearance. Will Smith looks good as a drunk homeless guy, but as he said in Men in Black-he makes everything look good.
Jason Bateman is saved by Will Smith and he decides to reform the drunken superhero before he bankrupts the city with his heroics. Jason Bateman seems an odd choice for the role to me, but he does a good enough job of wandering around looking disappointed about everything that Hancock does. His hottie wife is played Charlize Theron, who seems to know a lot more about Hancock than she is letting on. In his spare PR time Jason tries to Save The World, with no success whatsoever.
There is a lot profanity, a tiny bit of nudity, and lots of CGI things blowing up here and there as Hancock accidentally destroys them. Hancock becomes a good superhero, meets another of his kind-whatever that may be, and tries his best to keep the world safe. We find out that Hancock lost his memory after watching Boris Karloff Frankenstein in it’s original release-seems Hancock doesn’t age either. It also seems that if it weren’t for the popularity of YouTube, no one would know what a disaster area Hancock is.
Will Smith’s Hancock is not a totally nice superhero like Superman, Hancock has no problems with tossing bad guys out of forty story windows or killing them with candy bars. Of course, they were all bad men.
This was a fun movie, but it could have been better-which can pretty much be said about every movie ever made. I would have liked a bit more of the drunken superhero movie and bit less of the Let’s Save The World movie-ok, they could have left that would bit about saving the world out of the movie and it would have been a lot better.
Overall, I liked it.
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