Hancock Review

Hancock was okay, but nothing Super.  There was a freshness in places, especially in the beginning of the movie, that was great.  A lot of super hero movies have fairly cookie cutter characters and a fairly cookie cutter plot.  Hancock varied from traditional superhero template.  First and foremost, there was no Supervillian nemesis for Hancock to fight.  His battle was more with his own personality,public image, and past.  Also, a flawed superhero was pretty fresh.  And the world noticing things like collateral damage was fresh and interesting.  In most superhero movies, the super heros can trash the city fighting super villians and rescuing citizens and no one seems to care about the property damages incurred in the process.

However, I felt like Hancock had tons of holes.  There were  a lot of places where it felt like swaths of plot and character development were missing.  There were several places where it seemed as if the writers originally intended to tie things up and to make connections with things and they made some things recurr in a way that made you think they were going to be significant and be important to the story (or at least explained) later on, then were just dropped.  Almost as if there was another half hour or so of scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor.

And for a Superhero movie, the action part was a bit lacking.  It was a bit light on typical Super Action in places.  Sure, it had some.  But I think a bit more might have spiced it up some in some of the slower and more predictable parts of the movie. 

I think some parts of the movie were a bit done to death,though, and harmed the freshness factor a wee bit.  There were places where it was like "Okay, we get it.".   Some things were repeated and reinforced more than they needed to be and some things were left more vague and disconnected than they should have been. 

I recommend waiting on this one until it's on DVD or on TV.  It was pretty good.  I liked it overall, but it wasn't a stunner that you need to just run out and pay full price to see at the theatre. 

There were some funny parts in the movie,though.  Will Smith and Cherlize Theron performed well. 

It was definitely a Superhero movie for grown-ups rather than kids.  While there wasn't much in it that I think kids couldn't see (except maybe the use of the word a**h*le, quiet a bit, and a scene involving physically shoving one man's head up another's behind), there wasn't much in it that they'd want to see.  It would be VERY dull for your typical Spider-Man, Bat-Man, Hulk loving little boy.  It was light on the action.  Light on the pure old fashioned good guy versus bad guy fight scenes.  Heavy on the inner personality crisis drama.  Heavy on the romance.  More thinking and less "POW", "BOOM", "WHAP".  It was definitely aimed at the adult crowd.