Random Review #55: the movie "Hancock."

Directed by Peter Berg
Starring Will Smith, Jason Bateman, Charlize Theron
Release date: July 2, 2008
Rated PG-13

This summer is hands-down the summer of superheroes. With Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Night, and Hellboy II: the Golden Army all being released within a four-month period, it was only a matter of time before a studio would attempt at creating their own superhero. Hancock has been floating around Hollywood since 1996, and I think the studios saw this summer as the perfect opportunity to dust it off and give it proper cinematic treatment.
Will Smith, the owner of the 4th of July box office, stars as John Hancock, a drunken superhuman who is the only one of his kind. He lives in Los Angeles, and "helps" out the local police while costing millions in property damage. Hancock is hated by most of the public, only because they have to pay for his uncaring attitude. He then runs into Ray Embrey, a down-on-his-luck personal relations consultant, who tries to change Hancock's image into a positive one. Of course, a lot more happens in this film, but I'm definitely not one to give it away. It has a semi-suprising twist about halfway through, that completely blindsides you.
Hancock was a decent movie. It kept me entertained, Smith's acting was definitely good (as usual), and like I said, it has a decent twist halfway through. But this movie could have been one of the best of the summer if they wouldn't have edited the shit out of it. This movie was originally rated a "hard R," meaning that the MPAA (the people who rate movies) didn't even get through the first half of the movie before calling it. The distribution company, Columbia Pictures sent it back two times before the MPAA was okay with giving it the PG-13 it has now. Don't think I'm saying that a movie needs to be rated R to be good, but I think the storyline would have been much more improved if Peter Berg was free to do whatever he wanted with the movie. Hancock would have been a bigger douchebag, and the movie wouldn't have seemed so damn short.
That's just my opinion, though. I'm going to go ahead and say that this movie was my biggest disappointment of the summer 2008 movie season so far, only because I expected a lot better.