Careless and Car-less: Smith as a reluctant superhero.

From its bloat-free B-movie length of 92 minutes, to its larkish insouciance and casually integrated procession of CGI effects, Hancock finds Will Smith attempting to conjure up his old Men in Black mojo. The scattershot results, however, are a lot closer to the ho-hum, been-there-blew-that-up MIB2 than the genuinely inspired MIB1.

Accordingly, Hancock may very well turn out to be Smith's first Independence Day box-office underperformer since 1999's Wild Wild West. But you've got to give Smith - and director Peter Berg - an A for effort. It's not often that a wannabe summer blockbuster takes so many creative risks, or so flagrantly disregards audience's expectations of what a hot weather popcorn flick is supposed to be. That Berg stumbles more often than he scores is less a matter of directorial ineptitude than simply being temperamentally unsuited to the material. A Michael Mann manqué whose fondness for gritty, hand-held visuals (aka "shaky-cam") worked splendidly in Friday Night Lights and last year's The Kingdom, Berg makes the mistake of bringing those same artsy stylistic quirks to bear on an escapist romp. The fit is all wrong. Compounding Berg's inability to find a consistent tone and stick with it is the fact that he doesn't appear to have a sense of humor.

Half-baked and overcooked, Hancock wants to be a deconstructionist spin on the superhero movie that pokes holes - and takes gleeful satiric aim - at a genre that's rapidly calcifying from overexposure. Unfortunately, screenwriters Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan don't seem to know what to do with their high-concept premise once it's been established. Smith's John Hancock can fly like the Man of Steel, has super-human strength and can deflect any weapon thrown in his path. The only problem is that he doesn't particularly enjoy being a superhero. As a result, Hancock is one pissed-off (and usually soused) hombre. His carelessness on the job - major destruction invariably ensues whenever Hancock is taking a bite out of crime - and general surliness don't do much for his Q rating.

It isn't until Hancock rescues PR hotshot Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) from a speeding locomotive that a solution to his, uh, image problem presents itself. Embrey instructs Hancock to enter rehab, take anger management classes and even do a little jail time to prove that he's a mensch at heart. So far, so good. The film blows whatever goodwill it's earned in the generally amusing first half, though, by dispensing with logic and piling on more wildly inappropriate - and seemingly random - plot twists than it knows what to do with. What began as a witty character portrait of a disgruntled superhero soon dissolves into an exhausting string of not terribly interesting action set pieces and unfunny, increasingly strained jokes. Furthermore, Ngo and Gilligan's script seems to be missing huge chunks of exposition needed to take us from Point A to Point C in the story. Point B is conspicuously absent.

In a weirdly under-populated cast, the effortlessly droll Bateman fares best playing yet another variation on his Michael Bluth character from TV's Arrested Development. As Embrey's sourpuss wife, Oscar winner Charlize Theron has one of the strangest, and certainly least rewarding, roles of her career. Smith does what he can with Hancock: His comic timing remains rapier-sharp and his double-takes are among the best in the business. Yet there's only so much even the most gifted actor can do with such an underwritten - and quite frankly schizophrenic - part.

If Hancock was designed as a future movie franchise - and what studio film isn't these days? - I've got a hunch that the Sony executives who greenlighted this sodden mishmash are going to have some serious 'splaining to do at their next stockholders meeting. Not since Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Last Action Hero (a Sony Fourth of July dud in 1993) has a movie that looked so "can't-miss" on paper turned out to be so eminently skippable.

HANCOCK: Now playing areawide

Careless and Car-less: Smith as a reluctant superhero.