Hancock

Hancock

Directed by Peter Berg

(PG-13)

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A superhero does more harm than good in Los Angeles.

**

Hancock is “by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. Director Peter Berg achieves the unthinkable: an action movie that actually connects emotionally with its audience. Instead of throwing “realism overboard,” as most directors of blockbusters do, he concentrates on the characters and reminds us we’re watching “genuine actors” rather than digital ones. But Berg’s gritty vision doesn’t square with the film’s fantastical plot, said David Ansen in Newsweek. By imposing “a patina of hard-nosed realism” on an escapist genre, he creates a film that’s fatally unsure of itself. Will Smith plays Hancock, a hapless, perpetually drunk L.A. bum who happens to have superpowers. He’s a sorry excuse for a superhero, but only because he’s misunderstood. In other words, Hancock starts as a spoof. But after Smith’s path crosses that of PR man Jason Bateman and his mysterious wife, Charlize Theron, the plot becomes too “fanciful and convoluted” to stomach. By the hour mark, it’s as if you’re watching a totally different movie, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. Reinventing the superhero genre is a noble but “tricky notion.” Hancock fails at it spectacularly.