Hancock

Five-Word Synopsis: Will Smith: Scientologist, scientist, thespian.

Point

Alex: If there’s one thing Will Smith’s been good at the last four or five years, it’s making perfectly agreeable movies. I, Robot was fun, and I Am Legend looked pretty okay. And up next in that list of excellent airplane movies is Hancock, a movie that signals the coming of the Summer Blockbuster tide more accurately than the Farmer’s Almanac could ever dream of.

The superhero dichotomy usually swings perilously back and forth between campy and angsty, with Batman playing for the Harlem Globetrotters one decade and shooting heroin in a Denny’s bathroom the next. I hope Hancock will usher in a third option (trichotomy?): the poor, drunk, apathetic superhero. With any luck, within the year we’ll have a Spiderman sequel where he just stays home and smokes weed with his idiot roommate.

B+

Counterpoint

Jim: But it comes out on July 4th, by which time Iron Man, Indiana Jones, Speed Racer, Kung Fu Panda, The Incredible Hulk, Get Smart, AND Kit Kittredge: American Girl will have already been released. Do you mean that it signals the ebbing of the Summer Blockbuster tide more accurately than the Farmer’s Almanac? Because after Hancock there is basically only The Dark Knight and That X-Files Movie. Unless you count Tropic Thunder, in which case Kluck on, you Klazy Klavalier!

Alex: I refuse to believe there is another X-Files Movie coming out. Even the first one was probably some kind of vivid, physically manifesting hallucination on your part.

B+/F

What We Have Learned

Alex: Maybe they’ll ruin it in the actual movie, and Hancock will have only started drinking after his powers failed to save the woman he loved from being eaten by a velociraptor*. But with any luck, he’ll just be a drunk jerk who happens to be able to fly.

Jim: The B+ is for when he threw a whale at a boat and capsized it. The F is for oF course they are going to cop out and make him get his shit together (and stop throwing whales at boats).

*The Dinosaur Diaries #445 and #551. -Ed.