Review – Hancock

If there’s one lesson we all should have learned from The Last Action Hero and its ilk, it’s the importance of making action movies as simple as possible. And yet here’s another demonstration of what happens when a movie violates the simple rule. Things start out okay. Will Smith plays a superhero on the skids who tends to do as much damage as he prevents during his half-baked attempts at do-gooding. A flack (Jason Bateman) takes on the task of improving his image, much to the chagrin of the Mrs. Flack (Charlize Theron). So far so good, at least long enough to get the hero out of prison and through a couple of high-profile rescues in his new super suit. But with considerable running time left to kill, the filmmakers start introducing ridiculous plot twists. By the end the story has become an illogical, maudlin mess. This was never going to be a candidate for movie of the year, but it could have been better than it was. Mildly amusing