Will Smith, whose career I worried was in jeopardy between Wild Wild West (1999) and i, Robot (2004), returns with another $100+ million blockbuster in Hancock, a mere seven months after  the hit I Am Legend. Both are very good choices for the man who might just be our last true action hero (as the careers of Vin Diesel and The Rock continue to idle and superhero movies increasingly cast "real" actors); horror-actioners and superhero flicks are in, just as alien conspiracy sci-fi films were in when Smith was becoming a star in the mid nineties.

Hancock was a wise career move for Will Smith and can only do good things for his co-star Jason Bateman, whose journey from D-List reject to low-A-List favorite is one of Hollywood's nicest stories from the past few years. But despite the combination of two of my favorite people in Hollywood and the film's sure-hit status, Hancock is underwhelming in nearly every area it tries to succeed. As an action film, a comedy, and a family drama it fails, attempting each with all the conviction of Amy Winehouse at rehab.

As the film opens, Hancock (Smith) is drunk and asleep on a public bench in Los Angeles. A high-speed car chase between the police and some goons is going down on the freeway, but Hancock has to be woken up out of his drunken stupor by a concerned child, who gestures to the televisions in a store window and says sarcastically "Hancock? Bad guys?!" before calling him a bad name.

Hancock begrudgingly sits up on the bench, and pulls out another Seagram's whiskey from under the bench. Whiskey in hand and still drunk from the night before, he flies toward the freeway, eventually causing $9 million of damage in the foiling of the unspecified nefarious plot of the villains.

Hancock is a public relations nightmare, a hero whom the city hates for his unabashed drunken ways and tendency to destroy more things than he fixes. After he saves the life of PR man Ray Embrey (Bateman), Ray decides that he is going to help Hancock with the public's perception of him, which includes serving prison time for the charges filed against him by the city, at least until the city realizes how much they need their hero.

At some point I think the half dozen companies that produced this film realized that they had a superhero film without a villain or a concrete action plot, a story which was a half-hearted regurgitation of the moral lessons of half the superhero movies ever made without sufficient wit to make it a comedy or the conflict to make it an action film. Twists were added to make something resembling a more typical CGI-laden blow-em-up action film, but what results is a film whose lazy writing fails to maintain interest.

Hancock seems uninterested in its own plot's developments, throwing them out there in quick succession without sufficient explanation. Within ten or fifteen minutes of Hancock revealing he doesn't know his own origins, we find out what they are - sort of. The script, by Akiva "Batman and Robin" Goldsman, doesn't bother to explain Hancock's origins more than in one throwaway line, even though there's a character in the film who knows the entire story. Even then, the one line we get, "Some societies call us angels, some gods," is so vague and contrived that it's not so much a reveal as it is a Superhero Writing 101 no-no.

You may think there is more to the story - and certainly there is, as there is a big character reveal which is supposed to come as a twist but is made so painfully obvious by director Peter Berg in the opening minutes of the film as to make Lucky Number Slevin look like The Usual Suspects in comparison. There is also a side to the story which involves Ray, his wife Mary (Charlize Theron) and their son Aaron, but this is just so much token struggling-idealist-and-his-family-troubles nonsense; forgivable in the right film but only more tedious here.

The real crime of Hancock is what it could have been. Amidst superhero blockbusters which only seem to be growing in popularity at the same time that their pretensions to deeper meaning expand, Hancock could have been a deconstruction of the superhero myth, giving us a satirical, if not openly parodic, view of the very concept of a caped crusader. Instead it gets caught up in its own desire to engage in superhero-ness, resulting in an uneven film whose construction of a superhero myth is infinitely less interesting than the opposite. It is a film about the development of Hancock from a drunken bum to a stand-up hero, but by the end of the film you just find yourself remembering the opening moments of the film fondly and preferring the flying drunken bum with super strength to the bland superhero version of Hancock.