Disgruntled superhero Hancock (Will Smith, left) is in need of an image cleanup in the satirical film Hancock. (Columbia Pictures)

In the new superhero comedy-cum-melodrama Hancock, Will Smith is drunk, stubbly and monosyllabic — but charming. (You can’t pull off that particular combination, so don’t even try.) The third-most bankable star in Hollywood has a genetic predisposition for likeability; he’s a superhero just by showing up, not least of all in the eyes of the Hollywood brass, who are praying for the summer’s first big hit.

As un-caped, uncommitted crime fighter John Hancock, Smith plays a super-anti-hero. In the opening scene, he is roused from the park bench he calls home by a kid who greets him with: “There’s a shooting, jackass.” After giving back some of the same sass he gets, Hancock flies across the Los Angeles skyline to stop a freeway shooting spree with his bulletproof body and an array of foul-mouthed threats drawn from an impressive repertoire of head-in-orifice imagery.

When Hancock does good, bad happens: trains crash, cop cars turn over and the tarmac gets torn up by Hancock's heels when he lands. The fallout from his heroics is millions of dollars worth of damage and a drubbing in the media. The collateral wreckage is draining L.A.’s public coffers, as angry politicians point out, so they issue an arrest warrant for the scruffy, toque–wearing crusader.

The central, and best, joke of Hancock is: What if there were real-world repercussions for the kind of otherworldly, comic-book behaviour that’s unquestioningly cheered in superhero movies? At last, here’s a film for anyone who has watched Spiderman swinging from the Empire State Building and thought, 'Who, exactly, has to clean those sticky webs from those windows?'.

Hancock is too drunk and listless to care about his bad reputation, but a perpetually optimistic public relations flack named Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman, beautifully underplaying) is determined to help him out. While an unpopular, super-powered protector may be a rarity in movies (The Incredibles notwithstanding), the sympathetic PR guy is actually the most inventive character in Hancock. PR has become shorthand for sleazy duplicity: Lizzie Grubman off-screen; Wag the Dog on-screen. Ray, on the other hand, tries to convince a pharmaceutical company to increase its philanthropy by giving away TB medicine for free. He’s laughed out of the boardroom, but outside of the film, Ray will probably be cheered by PR people everywhere: Look up, up on the screen, finally a hero to redeem us!

Hancock turns out to have a history with Mary (Charlize Theron, right), the wife of his image consultant (played by Jason Bateman). (Columbia Pictures)

With everyone else balking at his save-the-world ideals, Ray turns to Hancock, offering his services to improve the bad boy’s image. Bateman and Smith have some nice Pygmalion moments, as Hancock learns to play to the cameras — i.e. wear a blue T-shirt and resemble Will Smith — and flatter the cops with awkward declarations of “Good job” at the scene of a crime.

The only person less than enthusiastic about Hancock’s makeover is Ray’s wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), who has an irrational loathing of the big fella. Theron and Smith trade many meaningful glances — director Peter Berg likes his actors tight and close — but once the nature of their link is explained, the film goes fuzzy. Superhero movies live and die by an internal logic; if those schematics are not sound, the audience can’t get lost in the story. And the explanation for Hancock’s existence, with its overtones of Frankenstein, Highlander and Wings of Desire, is a lumpy hybrid. Suddenly, the script — reportedly worked over by many but credited to only two: Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan — mutates into a muddled love story.

Theron and Smith deserve a love story; like their characters, they’re unworldly, somehow, inhumanly beautiful and slightly set apart from the rest of us (that’s why we call them movie stars). But the hoped-for pay-off never quite arrives – the love story falters on the uncertain plot structure and sucks the film away from the satire it was pointed toward. Hancock delivers a few pokes at media-numbed cultural cynicism and then rests on its laurels as a sometimes funny, multi-million dollar summer trifle (the F/X are slick but not particularly inventive). It’s a poppy popcorn movie with an infallible star and glints of intelligence, not the least of which is the length: in an age of blockbuster bloat, Hancock is just over 90 minutes long. Finally, a saviour.

Hancock opens across Canada on July 2.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.