Shaky Camera, Shaky Story

He’s a superhero who doesn’t have a cape or skintight costume. He doesn’t have a secret identity. He doesn’t even have a superhero name, like Fill-in-the-Blank Man.

What he does have is a baaaaad attitude. The word “asshole” is uttered in this movie about as often as “fuck” in GoodFellas, always as a description of this guy. And you’d be hard pressed ever to argue. Drunk, cranky, and as indifferent to collateral damage as Donald Rumsfeld, he’s a cure who’s often worse than the disease. In the film’s opening scene, he takes out three Asians joyriding down an LA freeway while blasting automatic weapons out the windows. But in the process, he does $9 million worth of damage to the city.

Meet Hancock, played by Will Smith. It’s a role that I’m guessing he was attracted to as a chance to play something besides his usual utterly likeable persona. But Hancock the movie is such a mess that even Smith’s box office clout is unlikely to rescue it after word gets out.

You can’t fault the timing for a movie like this. Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy II, and The Dark Knight are the heart of Hollywood’s hopes: The superhero genre is all that has brought audiences out in a year marked by declining box office figures.

And any time of year it’s a good source for comedy. Remember the malicious Man of Steel in Superman III? Or Peter Parker’s walk on the dark side in Spider-Man 3? Or Uma Thurman making life hell for the guy who spurned her in My Super Ex-Girlfriend?

So the opening sequences of Hancock are fun as we watch our less-than-inspiring hero break every rule in the superhero handbook. He flies while drunk. He leaves large craters everywhere he lands and takes off. He’s mean to children. He threatens to put peoples’ heads in anatomically impossible places (and in one instance actually does so).

Still, it’s a little hard to enjoy all of this mayhem (assuming that you can get past the fact that the destruction leveled in Hancock’s wake in a city the size of Los Angeles is highly unlikely not to cause human casualties) because of the way director Peter Berg films it. Just about everything is shot with a shaky hand-held camera, the kind usually reserved for Serious Independent Movies. You wonder, how are we supposed to enjoy all this when we can hardly see it?

Here’s the bad news: You’re not supposed to be enjoying it. Before it’s even out of the first act, Hancock starts dropping major hints that this does not have the soul of a comedy. And at about the halfway point, after Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron have entered the story as a PR guy determined to clean up Hancock’s image and his dubious wife, it morphs into something else entirely, something in the dramatic tragic romantic squishy category.

I am of course not at liberty to give away what happens. Suffice to say that the plot twist not only fails to answer most of the questions we have been asking about this puzzling character, it raises a whole new set of questions that go unanswered.

Understood, this is a movie about a man who can fly through the air at high speeds and juggle cars and send bullets bouncing off the skin. A certain suspension of disbelief about the story is called for. But trust me when I say that even given the standards of the genre, Hancock has plot holes and logical discrepancies you can’t possibly overlook.

For these, you can probably blame a script that went though a gaggle of writers and reshoots before arriving at theaters in its present form. At barely 90 minutes, it’s a safe assumption that some scenes were cut. (One that has been making the rounds of the internet rumor mills is a sex scene between Hancock and an admirer; from what I’ve heard of it, I’m less surprised by the fact that they cut it than that they even filmed it in the first place.)

Maybe I’m wrong. Hancock still has enough coarse humor and big special effects sequences (supervised by John Dykstra) that undemanding summer audiences may not care that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Still, that incessant, headache-inducing shaky cam makes this a hard movie to lose yourself in for those who just like to enjoy the gonzo stuff. Anyway you look at it, it’s a mess.