REVIEW: Hancock (12A)

Heroes just keep getting darker nowadays.

By the looks of the trailer for The Dark Knight, Batman now seems like the kind of guy who would give you a slap if you suggested he once camped it up in tights and hung out with Robin.

And even Bond has done away with zingy one-liners in favour of getting straight on with a cold, hard kill.

Dark is the new black, it would seem.

So surely moviegoers would employ super-speed to see Tonight, He Comes, a film about a superhero who can’t have sex without annihilating his partner.

Apparently not according to movie bosses, who decided even the Caped Crusader would draw the line at killing off love interests with superhuman semen...

So instead, we are left with the toned down (and pretty much completely re-written) version – Hancock.

The more family-friendly film sees the titular anti-hero (Will Smith) wreaking the kind of drunken havoc across Los Angeles that Amy Winehouse could only dream of.

But when his latest super-sozzled attempt at keeping the peace (during which he clocks up $9million worth of damages to the city) goes wrong, Hancock lands himself an arrest warrant and a city-load of irate civilians.

Enter PR guru Ray (Jason Bateman), who convinces the half-wit hero to abide LA’s wishes and do some hard time in an effort to show them how much they really need him when he’s not around

Everything seems to be working out after Hancock’s image re-launch, until the reformed wino’s eye wanders to Ray’s sexy wife, Mary (Charlize Theron).

Flying straight in at the deep end with a gun-blazing high-speed pursuit, director Peter Berg’s film steers clear of tired ‘how it all began’ superhero intros which eat into precious baddie-clobbering screen time.

But despite the welcomed no-nonsense narrative in the beginning, the film tries to make up for lost time by plonking in a ruddy great back-story just after halfway through, which slowly drains the fun out of it and is ultimately pointless.

Similarly, the lack of a nemesis is refreshing, leaving the sloshed Superman to deal with his own demons. But for some reason, Berg rushes a hook-handed villain in at the last minute, who merely serves as a catalyst for a high-octane finale (or perhaps so Hancock action-figures don’t get lonely on the shelves of Toys ‘R’ Us).

The plot progresses into Hancock’s rehabilitation a tad too quickly and loses sight of the comedy gold in his devil-may-care brand of justice (lobbing a beached whale back out to sea only to sink a sailing boat being one of the more visually hilarious).

Although admittedly very funny in places, Hancock fails to be anything more than an askew take on the genre, not adding much in the way of originality to the likes of dull ‘personality disordered superhero’ yarn My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

And although a horny hero stacking up the body count may have kept fans away in greater numbers than if you put Kryptonite in their popcorn buckets, it may have been the darker edge the film needed to keep from falling off the wagon.