First Hancock Trailer Impresses



The teaser trailer for Hancock, the Los Angeles-set summer action comedy starring Will Smith and Charlize Theron, and opening July 2 from Columbia, spends most all of its energy selling us Smith in schlubby, irascible form rather than really telling us anything about the story, which centers around a misunderstood superhero. But of course that works fine for a first-wave trailer, and Hancock looks to be huge. His first summer flick in four years, it’ll allow Smith to reclaim the mantle of the July 4th weekend that he’s been renting out in the interim.

There’s little sense of the tone of the comedy here, but it thankfully doesn’t seem too jokey and forced, which I feared from the initial premise. Perhaps most impressive is the infrastructure destruction footage, which comes via special effects work that mimics lots of the incidentally “captured” Powerade commercials with Lebron James, Michael Vick, et al.