Will Smith: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

5 Performances That Sucked...

5. Hancock - Hancock

On paper, Hancock had a lot of appeal, but someone decided to take a dark but brilliant script and tone it down in such a way that the darker elements that remained gave the film a jarring personality disorder. The film - which initially would have featured Hancock committing crimes including rape - never quite knows what it is, stumbling from clever post-superhero film, to traditional actioner to tragedy-tinged romance with misplaced classical aspirations. And sadly, the lack of strong identity is catastrophic for Will Smith's performance. He begins on good form, offering an irresistible anti-hero - the kind of washed-up hero that fans of late-era Westerns and late-career John Wayne movies would recognise as the hero without a purpose - but the shift in tone means he becomes almost immediately uninteresting as soon as Charlize Theron turns up. Smith was well cast - though an actor more suited to darker material may have meant less changes to the initial direction - but the material is so horribly lost, that his performance is only memorable for the first fifteen minutes or so, and by the end it's hard to even care what happens to him.