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Film Review: ‘Hancock,’ 2 stars

There is something intriguing about taking a genre and turning it on its head.

“Hancock” does that, and does it well for its first two-thirds, in which Will Smith plays the super hero as anti-hero. Hancock is a crime fighter so drunken, slovenly and sloppy at his job that the citizens of Los Angeles pretty much hate him, even as he protects them.

And Smith is so gleefully rotten, such an unrepentant jerk, that you can’t blame them.

But a jaw-dropping twist, while inspired, turns out to be what drags the movie down, creating an irresolvable situation from which the film never recovers.

It’s a great conceit, the jackass hero who can’t quite work out the details. Haven’t you ever wondered how Superman can fly around and never run into a flock of birds? Or those crazy chases that inflict massive property damage along the way, as buildings, cars and whatever else gets in the way are destroyed — how much must that cost?

About $9 million for one of Hancock’s pursuits, we learn in the first scene. It just gets worse for him from there.

During a typical cure-is-worse-than-the-disease rescue, Hancock saves Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), a public relations man with a heart of gold, from an oncoming train. (The special effects, here and everywhere else, are spectacular.)

Ray is a man with a conscience; his passion project is to get companies to donate their products to the needy, a plan that gets him laughed out of most of the corporate offices in L.A.

He is intent on repaying Hancock, so Ray offers to rehabilitate his image. He brings him home to dinner, where his son, Aaron, (Jae Head) is enthralled.

His wife, Mary (Charlize Theron)? Not so much. She cultivates a well-developed antipathy toward Hancock from the moment she sees him.

Ray’s idea is to allow the authorities to take Hancock out of action (he’s wanted for any number of things, including all those big-ticket property-damage bills for which he’s on the hook), watch the crime-rate rise and wait for the city to come begging for his return.

So far, so good — so very good, in fact. Then the story changes, dramatically. Mind-blowingly. In the moment, it’s a good thing, a truly cool development that will surprise and, for a time, delight.

But director Peter Berg has nowhere to go from there. Situations are set up for which there can be no satisfying conclusions — at least not a conclusion that would satisfy the audience for Hancock.

Other problems: Movies like this must establish rules. The hero can fly, have super strength, whatever. But it’s important to stick by those rules.

Granted, complaining about the lack of realism in a movie like this is like complaining about the calorie count in an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet.

Nevertheless, it must never feel like a cheat. Too much of “Hancock,” its internal rules included, goes unexplained and unresolved. The explanation for who and what he is, for instance, rings hollow. It’s too slight, too underdeveloped.

That’s too bad because Smith is great, particularly when he’s thumbing his nose at life (or downing a half-gallon of liquor). A superhero who calls a fat kid bullying Aaron “Thickness” — that’s outstanding.

Bateman has carved out a nice little movie career for himself by employing the Everyman comic rhythms he perfected on “Arrested Development,” a sort of understated bewilderment. Theron is good, as well.

But they all eventually fall prey to the story, which is like Hancock himself: a ton of potential, but ultimately a mess.

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Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language.

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