A strange thing about superhero movies is that nearly all them try to be funny, but very few them are comedies. Iron Man had enough laughs, but its amiable, smart-alecky humor seemed to have been injected, as if as an afterthought, into a sci-fi actioner. The real comedies in the superhero genre -- Mystery Men, Meteor Man, My Super Ex-Girlfriend -- have been largely unsuccessful.
For the first half of Will Smith's new movie, Hancock looks to be an exception to the rule. Like Superman, Hancock has been blessed with super strength, super speed, and flight, but he has not been blessed with Superman's stalwart character, toothpaste-commercial smile, tenderness toward humanity, or grandness of speech. The difference between the two is roughly that between Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street and Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa. And Hancock really should be the Bad Santa of the superhero genre -- a nasty, mean comedy that cuts through all the noble sentiments that even a good-humored franchise like Spider-Man exhibits when, for example, Aunt May takes the podium and gives a lecture about the importance of heroes.
Hancock never had a chance to be as raunchy as Bad Santa; naturally, studios are hesitant to waste Will Smith's profitability on an R-rated movie. But, within its limitations, it does just about everything right for the first 45 minutes or so. Hancock, an L.A.-based crime-stopper, drinks and curses; his rescues are haphazard, and he seems entirely indifferent to the collateral damage (we see him wreck roads, cars, trains and buildings, all spectacularly) and to the resultant scorn of the public. When they heckle him, he eggs them on, eager to show that he's no fonder of them than they are of him. We, of course, like him, partly because he's played by Will Smith, who's always likable, and partly because he is not destroying our cars. After each job, he retires to a lonesome bar or to his home, a secluded trailer in the mountains, when he's not in prison for destroying property.
The best scenes are those that follow him as he flies through the air with the grace of a badly tossed football, tumbling over geese and barely avoiding jets. It's a headlong rush, and it makes me think how unnecessarily dreary the gift of flight was in Superman Returns (for example), which was full of dully majestic shots of Superman gliding through the sky like an airborne ballerina, face placid as if contemplating the sunset. Iron Man and Hancock remind us that, when a man can fly, this should be exciting. Hancock is, I think, the first to show us how truly difficult landing on feet would be at a superhero's speed, and it makes me wonder why so few superheroes have had this tendency to skid or crash.
Despite Hancock's blunders, he does save lives, and early in the movie we see him rescue Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), a PR man who wants to return the favor: He wants to rehabilitate Hancock's image and make Los Angeles like him. His wife (Charlize Theron), on the other hand, is less than thrilled when he brings Hancock home to dinner. But Hancock opens up to Ray, admitting that he knows little of his own history: He woke up in a hospital in 1931 after a blow to the head with no memory of his life or even his name, and no one claimed him. He does not age. We begin to see his damaged soul in a less comic light, but the movie remains funny.
Then something happens, which I cannot reveal here without spoiling an important surprise, and the movie's not funny anymore. It's no longer a comedy. I wish I could say more about it. I will say that Charlize Theron's character is very grim indeed, and, though her behavior, once explained, is understandable, she hasn't much personality aside from her grimness. Ray, the peppy, optimistic PR man, who has an amusing relationship with the laconic, caustic Hancock, abruptly becomes rather useless and is pushed to the side. The finale is brutal, juiced-up drama, a hyperreal concoction of gunshots, shattered glass, pouring rain, severed limbs, and movie stars writhing in agony. It does not seem suited to the movie that preceded it. The transition from fun to gravitas takes places too quickly, I think. The movie is only 92 minutes; it should be longer. If Peter Berg, the director, wants to take Hancock in this direction, he should first let us have the fun that the previews promise; here, the fun ends too soon, and the drama starts with an unpleasant jolt, where there should be a gradual build. If Hancock is destined to become as loftily mythic as Superman Returns, we might at least have some warning.
For its first half, I recommend it anyway, but that is sort of beside the point: It is a Will Smith summer movie, and as such it demands to be seen. Smith has a better track record as a star of blockbusters than anyone else working, and Hancock is another modest success (though its take at the box office will, I suppose, be anything but modest), on the approximate level of I, Robot. Still, I think it might be nice, for a change, to see Smith in something else, in the kind of movie that asks neither for a big opening weekend nor for an Oscar nomination for Best Actor -- a low-key drama or a really dirty comedy or a small production to which he might lend the kind of shimmer, that peculiar incandescence, that low-budget movies, even when intelligent and entertaining, usually lack. Smith hasn't played a nonhero since 1993, with Six Degrees of Separation, still his most interesting movie, no matter how fond I am of Independence Day. Here he comes close to being a real guy, despite the superpowers. But Hancock cost $132 million more than Bad Santa did: It had to compromise.