Will Smith, Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron, left to right, star in the disappointing action-comedy Hancock. The action is low-brow slapstick and the comedy is almost nonexistent.

Columbia Pictures / Frank Masi

Will Smith’s Hancock is a summer popcorn movie that’s a ton of poppycock revolving around a boozy, unlikely superhero who tries to redeem himself with the advice of a kindly public relations man

At least that’s what it seems to be about for its first hour. Then, having exhausted that storyline, Hancock flies off in a wild new direction, turning into a sort of suburban California version of Highlander with a touch of Desperate Housewives tossed in for good measure.

Writers Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan don’t seem to have a clue as to what kind of story they’re telling. Hancock is not very funny, although there is some amusing irony and a lot of slapstick comedy. It’s action-packed, yet hollow … an excuse to blast us with every CGI special effect the filmmakers could think up. It goes for the heart, yet too late. Its bizarre ending seems built around tearjerker tragedy, but then — whoops! — adds an epilogue that says, “We were only kidding!”

The usually likable Smith tests all the good will he has built up in several hit films as John Hancock, a booze-loving homeless man who has remarkable powers that would put Superman to shame. He flies like a rocket. Bullets bounce off him. He can lift an SUV as though it were made of tissue paper. He’s ready at a moment’s notice to leap into action to thwart injustice or halt a calamity in the making.

Yet Smith plays him as such a grumbling, angry, arrogant character that even after he’s inevitably redeemed late in the film it’s hard to warm to him. He seems to have no sense of the colossal damage his actions cause, which eventually make the populace of Los Angeles demand that he stop trying to “protect” them.

There’s a wild example of this during the relentlessly exhausting first action sequence in Hancock, when he zooms skyward to stop a trio of bad guys who are being chased by the police down a freeway. First Hancock jumps into the back seat to reason with the three thugs. Failing that, he lifts the SUV and flies over L.A. with it, smashing windows of office buildings, eventually skewering it on the pylon atop the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood. Hancock’s escapade rings up $9 million in damages.

But later he rescues Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), whose car is stuck on a railroad track with the train bearing down on it. That seems a wonderful good deed at first, but at second glance one realizes that Hancock has destroyed a locomotive engine and several cars when he could have just lifted the car stuck on the tracks and flown off with it. Hancock just can’t understand why people don’t love him for his deeds. He thinks he is misunderstood. Boo-hoo.

Nevertheless, goodhearted Ray, who hasn’t been able to get much traction from corporations with his good-deeds public relations ideas, sees in Hancock a chance for a future marketing bonanza if he can turn this superhero’s public image around and make him as beloved as Superman.

It won’t be easy. Not with Hancock tearing up a street’s asphalt every time he lands with a ka-boom or teaching a school bully a lesson by tossing him hundreds of feet into the air.

Ray’s wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), is not as impressed with Hancock’s exploits. She doesn’t like his meanness, his crude directness, his way of wolfing down dinner, the way he reacts on base impulses. Yet there seems to be more than just those things in her wariness. In her eyes there’s an element of recognition and nervousness that will only be explored late in the film.

Hancock’s destructive violence — and there’s a lot of it in this PG-13 film as well as more profanity than one might have expected — eventually lands him in prison where his anger at first only balloons because many of the inmates have been put behind bars because of Hancock and are out for payback. But he’s not taking any guff. In the lowest of the film’s lowbrow moments, Hancock shoves an inmate’s head into the rear end of another prisoner — “where the sun don’t shine,” as they say. Oh ho, ho, ho.

Sometime-actor Peter Berg made his name as a director with Friday Night Lights and last year had a hit in The Kingdom, about a team of U.S. agents trying to find a terrorist den in Saudi Arabia. But that film had a straighter storyline than Hancock and, more importantly, sympathetic heroes. Hancock is all over the map as it veers from action to homey family situations to an outlandish thousand-year-old solution as to how Hancock derived his incredible super powers. The plot is overwhelmed by a blizzard of special effects and people smashing through plate glass windows with the regularity of clockwork.

In its fast pacing and many quick cuts, the focus is lost. The connection between Hancock and Mary is never believable for there’s no chemistry between Smith and Theron, nor with Bateman for that matter. His Ray seems naïve and simpleminded. And in Smith, Hancock is an anti-hero who doesn’t truly become sympathetic until the final reel when the film reaches for spirituality in its mumbo-jumbo tale. Really, it’s difficult to warm to someone who, when asked to smile, can only grimace.

**Hancock

Starring: Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com