Hancock

[July 2nd, 2008]

Just when it seemed we’d seen the last of Kobe Bryant for the summer—vanquished by the Boston Celtics, insulted by Shaquille O’Neal in freestyle rap—here he is headlining the Fourth of July weekend’s marquee action movie. Granted, he’s cloaked in the façade of Will Smith, but consider the characteristics of Smith’s John Hancock: He’s a surly Los Angeles superstar with a preternatural vertical leap and open contempt for his teammates, forced to disgustedly mumble his way through image-repairing press conferences after he’s sent to prison. (In the movie’s original cut, since trimmed for a PG-13 rating, he was jailed for statutory rape after a 17-year-old girl had an unfortunate encounter with some Hanjizz.) Once the similarity to a certain Laker has been noticed, it’s nearly impossible to shake—you’re welcome!—and I spent much of Hancock’s 92 minutes wondering when Shaq would arrive to ask how his ass tastes.

It would have been a fitting question: Hancock is a movie with a strong anal fixation, and its flavor is pretty sickening. One jailhouse scene features an inmate’s head literally shoved into another’s rectum, and the film’s chief running gag is that its hero grows extremely peeved whenever he’s called an “asshole.” He’s called that a lot. The unadorned obscenity is used so often in Hancock that it qualifies as a catchphrase.

Aside from this motif, director Peter Berg’s movie is a disorienting fizz of ideas that never cohere. Its chief conceit—the superhero as a celebrity in dire need of rehab—is established by shots of the crapulous Hancock waking up next to empty whiskey bottles, either on bus-stop benches or in his dreary trailer, with Berg’s distinctive cinematography giving each shot the haze of a hangover. But Berg’s style, an agitated handheld fervor honed in Friday Night Lights, is exactly wrong for this material, which I think is supposed to be a satire. It’s hard to say for certain, since there are no funny jokes. In their place, Berg spins his camera around the actors (Jason Bateman as an idealistic PR flack and Charlize Theron as his secretive wife) in paroxysms of emotion. By the time the villains return, still miffed about the head-stuffed-in-bum incident, we’re meant to cry whenever the screen starts to spin.

But cry for whom? The gifted Übermensch whose fans just don’t understand him? This self-pity has become a staple for Will Smith as his success has grown; in pictures like The Pursuit of Happyness and I Am Legend, he has bemoaned the cruelty of a world that’s damned him to be noble and handsome. I had hoped that Hancock would be a departure, that it might restore some of Smith’s Fresh Prince swagger, but instead it’s the most explicit demonstration yet of the wallowing that has drained a superstar of his powers. Maybe it’s right that Smith gets called an “asshole” throughout Hancock: He certainly bored the shit out of me. PG-13.