Narrative Issues: Hancock
Overall grade: B+. It's thoroughly enjoyable, and fairly original. But I can't help but find fault. Spoilers ahoy!


Stop reading if you don't want to know what happens.

Here's the plot: Hancock is invulnerable, can fly, and drinks heavily. He saves people and fights crime, but in a rather careless way. (It's a little reminiscent of the Greatest American Hero but as embittered drunk.) He saves Ray's (Jason Bateman's) life one day, and being a PR flack, Ray tries to turn Hancock's life around. (Since this is the movies, Ray does it by getting Hancock to be a better person. In real life, a PR guy would just buy commercials and place favorable media stories.) However, we can see that Hancock and Mary, Ray's wife (Charlize Theron), have some sort of connection. One evening Hancock makes a pass at Mary, and she throws him through a wall, hissing, "don't you ever let Ray find about me." Turns out, Mary and Hancock are both immortal godlike beings who are "meant for each other" and, interestingly enough, tend to lose their powers when they are together.

All is well for the first half of the movie. There's some comedy as Will Smith kicks ass half-assedly. Hancock grows emotionally (though we still don't really know why he drinks or why he fights crime). The good people of L.A. learn to appreciate his heroism and he learns to be a better person.

Clearly, the central idea of this movie is "what if there were a superhero, but he's an alcoholic jerk?" It's not a bad bad premise, and they do it with flair and comedy. But the writers have a couple of problems. The first problem is: why, if Hancock is a self-absorbed jerk, does he keep saving people? And second, once he is reformed, what the heck do we do for narrative tension?

A mediocre movie would probably not bother answering the first question, and would just supply a Big Bad Supervillain to handle the second. To its credit, Hancock tries to go a bit deeper. Turns out that throughout history Hancock and Mary have tried to be together, but every time they get together they lose their powers and immortality, and Hancock nearly gets killed. The last time this happened Hancock got hit on the head and lost his memory, and Mary decided that they would both be better off if they just stayed apart.

Of course, instead of just sitting down and explaining the whole thing to him, we must first indulge in one of the oldest superhero clichés: when two heroes meet for the first time, they must fight! So, I was a little disappointed in that. This particular cliché depends on really poor communication skills, which is always sort of unbelievable, but when the two principals are thousands of years old (and have known each other for all that time), it's really unbelievable. Surely Mary would know that Hancock won't just walk away.

In this case, it also makes Mary a first-class jerk. Apparently she's decided that despite having the power to change the course of mighty rivers (she alludes to being more powerful than Hancock), she's content to let him rot away as a forlorn amnesiac alcoholic, alone and misunderstood. Moreover, she could be out saving the world too, but has decided that the higher ambition is to be... a soccer mom! So progressive!

The resolution, of course, is that Hancock sacrifices his own happiness for hers. He moves to New York, so that they can keep their powers and not die. She gets to keep playing house with Ray. (And let's face it, this is just a lark for her: Ray and his son will grow old and die, and she will either have some explaining to do or will have to leave them eventually.) We never really get an answer as to why Hancock is driven to heroism, except maybe that he's "built" that way. Mary uses that phrase a couple of times. Is it just a turn of phrase? If not, built by whom and for what purpose? Why the whole lose-your-powers when together bit? If Hancock is supposed to be fghting crime, what's she supposed to be doing, besides making breakfast and spaghetti for Ray? And what about all the other demigods, the ones who "paired off and died." Did they fulfill their purposes?

The bad news here is that there are a lot of questions to answer before any of this makes much sense. The whole ancient godlike lovers idea sort of overwhelms the ""messed up drunken hero with a heart of gold" idea. The good news is that at least the writers tried, which is more than you get from the average summer blockbuster, and they can always try to flesh out the backstory in a sequel. Heck, they can even do prequels: Will Smith and Charlize Theron battle evil at the dawn of time!

I'd pay money to see that.

Oh, and while I do want to give them some credit for originality --- after all, this isn't just another Marvel franchise pulled off the shelf --- there is a lot of prior art in the "ancient heroes mistaken for gods who lose their memories" department. I'm thinking in particular of the Eternals, especially Neil Gaiman's version. It even jives with the whole "built" question: the Eternals are not natural lifeforms, but were created by the Celestials as part of their inscrutable genetic experiment on Earth.