Executive Summary: I liked Hancock. I liked it a lot. It’s a little sappy and, yes, don’t think about the set-up too much because you’ll be like “but.. but…” through the whole thing if you do. All that said, it’s a fun movie, emotionally ambitious and it doesn’t really end up in the place a movie would have ended up before 1998 or so. Cinematic narratives are moving forward, it seems.

I really want to write about this movie, but to cover the things I want to cover, I’m going to need to go into some detail. I guess what I am saying is…

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Got it? Cool. If you want a review and some thoughts on Hancock that isn’t spoiler’iffic, check out Heidi MacDonald’s.

Hancock’s big lesson for superhero movies: the first one doesn’t have to be an origin film. I’m pretty sure that the writers have a very clear idea of what/who Hancock is. The story is a bit of a mishmash. It didn’t really bother me, but, I don’t exactly take the most straightforward approach to life or narratives, either. I think that’s important about Hancock is that it shows you can enjoy a story about a superhero with nothing but hints about where he came from.

These guys clearly disagree (though I agree with them about the dirty parts — cross your fingers for a remixed DVD). I have always thought Hollywood sweated the origins way too much. I know non-comics fans feel like they want to know the origins of characters, but I think they would still go see first movies that only hint to a character’s origin. I hope Hancock convinces Hollywood to relax about origins, because that means they might still make this Green Arrow movie, which is the best concept I’ve heard for a superhero movie yet.

If Hollywood is trying to do superheroes without recourse to comic based source material, I think they left the origin vague in order to do sequels. Good. I think they know what his background is in great detail, but they haven’t told us because that’s how they are making up for the fact that it isn’t a hero with thirty years of history in the funny books to draw on.

I think this could ultimately work, though I think it will also mean we’re going to have two or three more movies that will all, ultimately, just be about Hancock figuring himself out. That’s what all stories seem to be about anymore. Even when you have a character with great capacity to change the world, people still just want to see those characters figure their own shizzle out, not deal with everyone else’s.

The big looming question for me is this: what myth is Hancock based on? The eagle affinity must be a big tip off. Did anyone else spot other clues? Hancock always has eagle symbols around him. In fact, at the end, he seems to have picked up an eagle for a sidekick. My guess is that he’s based on Ra or Nisroch or another eagle headed god. A little Internet research said that several ancient cultures in Africa and the Middle East made the eagle a symbol of the Sun. So this makes sense, both for Smith, as a black actor, to play a character based on an African deity and for him to have that thing for eagles.

As a black superhero, I can’t help but think that someone in the movie world wanted to pair Hancock up with a bird as a tip of the hat to to one of comics’ greatest black superheroes, The Falcon.