In the late 1980s, Marvel Comics published a miniseries called Damage Control. It was a playful, self-reflexive satire of superhero comics, all centred around a very practical question: who cleans up all the messes that Spider-Man, or the Hulk, or the Fantastic Four make while battling evil? Damage Control argued—only half tongue in cheek, really—that you’d need a specialized team of employees, working around the clock, just to keep New York City looking presentable.

I’d completely forgotten how good a joke Damage Control was until watching the opening scene of Hancock, when a superpowered Will Smith drunkenly stops a high-speed car chase by dropping and impaling the offending SUV onto the spire of an office building. The incident, we’re told, costs the city $9 million—“a personal best” for the city’s unwanted quasi-protector—but Hancock couldn’t care less about public property. He’s both immortal and can fly, so instead of bracing his fall while landing, he just kind of lurches into the pavement from 10,000 feet up, leaving clouds of dust and person-shaped potholes wherever he goes.

In other words, Hancock is a public relations nightmare. Help comes in the unlikely form of Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), a starry-eyed image consultant looking for a new project; when Hancock saves him from an oncoming train (out of sheer irritation as much as altruism), Ray decides to help our stubbly antihero turn his reputation around.

This is the basic plot of Hancock—at least according to the trailer and marketing campaigns. And it’s surprisingly successful, too: Smith’s Hancock is a brooding, introspective drunk, which makes those outbursts of whiskey-fueled heckling seem all the more endearing. Even Bateman, who is essentially reprising his Michael Bluth character from Arrested Development (albeit with less effective one-liners), is a decent comic foil; add in his overly skeptical wife (Charlize Theron) and overly enthusiastic son (Jae Head), and the film feels hard-wired for success.

From there, however, things start to take off in strange new directions, and you quickly realize you have no idea what kind of movie you’re watching. At first, Smith’s alcoholism and self-imposed isolation seem like the makings of a darkish character study, but we never penetrate deeper than the acidic surface wit. Similarly, a dinner conversation about Hancock’s murky past, which initially seems like the obligatory, self-contained origin scene, winds up derailing the plot for a full half hour. If the film gets savaged in the next few weeks, either by critics or audiences, it will be because of this indecisiveness on the part of its creators: is Hancock a comedy or an action film? A skewering of the superhero genre, or the latest addition to it?

Personally, I welcome the confusion. You rarely get actual surprises in this young but already thoroughly defined genre, and there are several moments where you feel the creative pulse of Vincent Ngo’s original 1996 screenplay (when it was titled Tonight, He Comes)—written a full four years before superhero films became synonymous with formulaic summer blockbusters. Now, after several rewrites and more than a decade in Hollywood limbo, Hancock remains a highly entertaining look at how having superpowers would most likely wreck our lives. Not to mention our sidewalks.