Will Will Smith’s box-office winning streak come crashing to earth with Hancock?
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian |“Will Smith memorably starred in sci-fi movies called I, Robot and I Am Legend. This one could be called I, Asshole. Smith, dressed in grungey clothes and deprived of the courteous charm that usually makes him such an attractive screen presence, is frankly vacuous. I wondered what it might have been like with Snoop Dogg in the role, out of his head on skunk and habitually abusive. Well, he might have been awful in other ways, but he wouldn’t have been as solemn.”
David Poland, The Hot Blog | “Hancock is another film that fits right into director Peter Berg’s habits. It’s a superhero movie that is not a superhero movie. It has complex ideas. It has quiet moments when most studio movies would be giving you zip. It pushes the funk harder than usually makes studios comfortable. Yes, there are young directors working on a higher intellectual plane than Berg and who are ambitious about drama in a much rawer way. I would never want to see every film be a Peter Berg film. His stylistic influence has been excessive already, to the point where reviews of The Kingdom accused him of stealing it. But I want to see every Peter Berg film because I know that whatever script he is working with, he is going to take it somewhere more real in the context of Hollywood filmmaking than we normally see. He has a bit of Mann in him, a bit of director Mel Gibson, and a bit of Budd Boetticher.”
David Denby, The New Yorker | “Hancock is a surprisingly resonant spectacle that places three people with recognizable feelings in the middle of a wild fantasy. The currents flowing between her and Smith are reminiscent of the heat generated by Gable and Harlow, say, or Bogart and Bacall. It turns out that there’s a bond between these two (which I won’t reveal), and the rest of the movie, which includes some superb comic invention as well as scarily turbulent scenes, grows out of it. Hancock suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop. It’s by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer.”
