Sometimes action movies are startling bad. The film opens with mayhem. The viewer catches fragmentary glimpses of inflammables colliding amidst a cacophony of screechings, presumably extracted from the death throes of molested sows. The scenes lurch awkwardly through fragmented plot space full of ill-conceived coincidences and monomaniacal protagonists. Such affairs are generally quite dull.
Hancock's opening moments, though, present a promising anti-hero and an action scene full of EXPLOSIVE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Who is this drunken mess of a super-hero? Where did he come from, why does he act like a buffoon? It's hard not to be intrigued. There are several incongruities in the world (why exactly would prisoners try to pick a fight with a superman?), but they can be overlooked. There's a gratifying sense of suspense - Will Smith is capable of snapping children in half if he's feeling piqued, or demolishing houses with a misplaced flex of a bicep. And Will Smith is even able to coax some humor out of the script.
With such a fantastic central idea and an encouragingly competent introduction, it was all the more heartbreaking to see this movie take a sharp plunge into idiocy. A mistimed and totally confounding plot twist sends the entire film reeling. All respect for character motivation and consistency is hastily discarded, and the carefully cultivated developments of the first half of the film are abandoned by an astonishing indifferent director. Did no one watch the movie through? Did anyone question why a poorly conceived and totally unnecessary plotline was thrust into an interesting story? I, for one, would rather have seen zombie tambourine men swarm the city streets demanding civil rights for iguanas. I wanted the old plot back, and the increasingly nonsensical parade of inadequately explained occurrences did little to convince me that the film's new direction was worth pursuing (The revelations concerning Hancock's background are not only implausible, but unimaginative. It would have been better if the writers had not attempted an explanation).
As the story limped to its conclusion, I could not help but grieve for the film that could have been. The clever and innovative scenes unrealized, an elevation of mundane personal problems into crises of federal concern. How fun it could haven been to watch a city deal with an unbalanced and destructive superman. Instead, the crises in this film are all internal, as the movie frantically endeavors to recall what it's supposed to be about.
