Hancock
Hancock starts out with an interesting premise: What if Superman wanted no part of the responsibilities his great powers required of him? What if he just buckled under the pressure and loneliness of being a one-of-a-kind super-powered alien?
The result is the film's eponymous hero, Hancock, a drunken bum with extraordinary powers and no concern for how he uses them. Even when he tries to do good, the collateral damage is so extreme it hardly seems worth it for society to have his help. Hancock's disregard of his potential superheroism stems from amnesia about his origins—the source of the film's two major plot twists. But heavy-handed direction and a stripped down script with everything moving way to fast makes the first surprise too obvious and the second too confusing.
The characters are too thin, their motivations too undefined, their
antagonist too vague to even be a cliché. Hancock fails in its mission
to infiltrate the crowded superhero marketplace because it loses sight
of what has made the recent boom in excellent comic book movies so
successful: a good story. Instead, Peter Berg delivered a visually
polished but structurally unsound mess.
- July 10, 2009
DVD Extras
The usual slew of behind-the-scenes featurettes in which the actors,
director and crew pat themselves on the back for doing something new
and original even though they're pilfering everything from other comics
and movies.