What if you had super powers, had no idea who you were, had no one like you to understand your problems, and felt a need to play the role of super hero whether Los Angeles likes it or not. Oh ya, in addition to having overwhelming super hero depression, you're also an alcoholic. If this sounds familiar, then perhaps you're Hancock.

Will Smith stars as the unappreciated movie's namesake, saving lives and stopping crime at an incredible price to society. We're talking major dollars.

The movie opens with a high impact, police chase down a busy LA freeway with a group of gang members firing automatic weapons randomly at pursuing LAPD and anyone else who happens to get in the way.

The breaking news is all over the television, but it's not until a young boy wakes the drunken, passed out hero on a bus bench and points to a TV in a nearby store front that the "hero" leaps into action, destroying the bus bench in the process. Immediately involved in the pursuit, Hancock destroys highway signs, wrecks a number of police cars and finally lands in the back of the bad guys car asking them to pull over or else.

Rather than listen, the gang members defy his instructions, instead calling him the less than polite name for a rectum. For some reason that really triggers a response in Hancock. The anit-hero takes them for a ride, flying and tossing the vehicle around before finally spiking it atop a Los Angeles landmark.

The dollars and cents attached to his heroics are staggering.

The police, city leaders and citizens begin calling for him to stop helping.

Then his chance meeting with Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) a PR and marketing guy who has high aspirations for corporations to turn away from greed and do things in the best interest of the people they serve, including in one case offering free pharmaceuticals to patients who need but can't afford them. So you can see why he is struggling a bit. On his way home from his latest PR failure, he is trapped in traffic on a railroad track. At the last minute, he is saved by Hancock, in a manner of speaking, who tosses the car on top of a group of other cars and derails the entire locomotive in the process.

Convinced that Hancock means the best, Ray offers to provide free publicity to help makeover his image. This includes cleaning up his behavior, giving up the booze, participating in group anger management and patiently waiting in jail for the crime numbers to go up and the public beg for his return. Along the way he runs into a large group of folks he's helped incarcerate but after literally introducing one inmates head to another inmate's butt - the criminals pretty much leave him alone.

Eventually the call from the police chief comes, and a reformed, new heroic Hancock emerges, complete with leather super hero duds.

And while the new Hancock wins over his former critics, changes begin to happen and more of his past is revealed setting up a meeting with another of his kind, and placing the formerly immortal Hancock on the edge of death.

There's plenty of witty dialogue, well directed action, and Smith is very convincing in the role as the disgruntled, lost and then reborn hero who just wants to be wanted. Charlize Theron, who just makes the screen look good, is a perfect supportive wife to Ray. However she proves bizzarely overprotective of her husband and son, who idolizes Hancock. Bateman is great as Ray, the idealistic do-gooder who wants to see the best in everybody and puts it all on the line to make Hancock a true hero.

The movie may be a bit rough for kids under 13 - thus the PG13 rating - as Will delivers the F-bomb once, and swearing litters the film.

Director Peter Burg delivers a very unique super hero story in a summer filled with comic book blockbusters. It's good, not great, but good.

* MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sme intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence and language.