Review of Hancock (2008) by Chads. — 01 Jul 2008

They're immortals. Angels. John Hancock(Will Smith) is not a superhero per se. That's the gist of Mary's words as she tries to delineate their species. Superheroes are concepts that the media hatched up.

Hancock is a god. And gods don't exert their will on the physical world. They do nothing. But like Mary Embrey(Charlize Theron), names change, so the god became a superhero, and superheroes are supposed to save people.

That's why Hancock drinks. His existence preceeded the advent of "Action Comics" in 1938. Before Superman, before Spider Man, Hancock and Mary were less definable. When Hancock's PR man(Mary's husband) Roy presents his client with a crime-fighting costume, the eternal man feels the pressure to live up to this fictionalized ideal of himself.

Now that Hancock wears a comic book get-up, he conforms to the social norms of superhuman crime-fighting. Meanwhile, his soulmate approached her "otherness" by becoming a post-feminist. Mary is like a Stepford wife.

She met her husband in a supermarket. She's never going to age. Roy's discovery about his domestic goddess' true identity could have been handled with a bit more subtlety. "Hancock", at times, reimagines Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" as a superhero movie.