Hancock (2008)

Here's the thing about Hancock: it has one genuinely brilliant idea rattling around inside it, and it wastes it so completely that by the end you're almost angry at the film for what it could have been. What if Superman was a drunk, antisocial wreck who the public actually despised? That's a sharp, funny, potentially subversive premise. And for about twenty minutes, Hancock almost pulls it off.

Will Smith, a man who has made a career out of being impossibly likeable, commits hard to playing the title character as a bored, apathetic vigilante with zero accountability. He's flying around Los Angeles like a grumpy, hungover god, "saving" people while trashing highways, destroying public property, and generally making things worse. He gets arrested. He becomes a punchline. There's a dark, satirical edge to the first act that feels genuinely fresh, almost bold for a big studio blockbuster. You think: right, this is going somewhere interesting.

It does not go somewhere interesting.

The second half of this film falls apart so spectacularly, so bafflingly, that I sat there wondering if I'd missed a scene. Out goes the gritty, grounded satire. In comes a clunky origin story nobody asked for, a forced romance that makes no emotional sense, and a third-act twist involving ancient immortal couples that lands like a wet sock to the face. It doesn't just undercut what came before, it obliterates it. Suddenly the film isn't about redemption, or fame, or consequence, or any of the actually interesting things it was gesturing towards. It's about awkward supernatural family dynamics and a mythology the script clearly made up about ten minutes before filming. The logic is non-existent. The stakes evaporate completely.

The pacing lurches from sluggish to frantic and back again. The dialogue has genuine cringe moments, lines that land with a thud in an otherwise silent room. The film can't decide if it wants to be edgy, heartfelt, or funny, so it attempts all three and fumbles each one. There's a message buried in there somewhere, something vague about love and purpose, but it feels so tacked on that it barely registers. You don't feel it. You just clock it and move on.

This isn't a case of bad acting. Smith is doing what he can, and the supporting cast aren't the problem either. It's a structural, tonal and scripting disaster of the highest order. I've seen Suicide Squad (2016) pull a similar trick, starting with an interesting wrinkle on the superhero formula before collapsing under the weight of its own incoherence, but at least that film is entertainingly chaotic. Hancock manages something more deflating: it starts with fire and ends with a whimper. It's not loud enough in its failure to be a fun disaster. It's just disappointing.

And for Will Smith specifically, it's a particular shame. Compare this to something like I Am Legend, a film that also puts him largely alone against a broken world and actually wrings something out of that isolation, and you can see how much is squandered here. He's more than capable of carrying a dark, unconventional blockbuster. Hancock just never figures out what it actually wants him to carry.

One and a half stars. Arguably one of the worst superhero films made in the modern era, and not for any of the reasons you might expect. It's not offensive. It's not even aggressively bad. It's just a catastrophic misfire: a film that looks at a genuinely exciting idea, shrugs, and trips over itself on the way to something far more generic. A cautionary tale in how not to reinvent a genre you clearly don't fully trust.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2008  | Watched: 2025-09-13

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