Mr. Fourth of July becomes Mr. Thanksgiving as Will Smith’s latest blockbuster Hancock soars onto DVD just in time for Turkey Day.

Hancock
Sony
Single Disc: $28.96
Two-Disc Edition: $34.95
Blu-ray: $39.95

This past summer, the trailers for the Will Smith superhero blockbuster Hancock seemed to play on a continuous loop in theaters, on television and online.  Over and over again, we saw the title character— a perpetually pissed-off superhero dressed to the nines in the very best homeless chic—mouth off to innocent civilians, toss a little kid miles into the air and hurl a beached whale back into the ocean, knocking over a sailboat in the process. This stuff is supposed to be funny for two reasons: 1) Hancock is basically Superman with a wicked hangover and 2) He’s played by Smith a.k.a. The Nicest Guy in Hollywood. That’s right, after years of playing virtuous heroes, the Fresh Prince is trying to dirty his onscreen image a bit. As these kinds of career reinventions go, Smith’s transformation in Hancock isn’t quite as extreme as, say, Denzel Washington in Training Day or Michael Chiklis in The Shield, but you gotta give the guy credit for working so hard at being bad.

It’s just a shame that the movie lets him down. Directed by Peter Berg and penned by Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan, Hancock has some terrific ideas at its core—it just can’t realize them onscreen. The project’s troubled production history, which was exhaustively chronicled in a New York Times piece earlier this year, no doubt has a lot to do with this. Originally conceived by Ngo as a super-dark superhero drama entitled Tonight He Comes, the film was set to be directed by Michael Mann, who eventually opted out and the script passed through the hands of several filmmakers until it ended up with Berg.  Script changes were still being made during shooting and in the editing room and early test screening reports indicated that the film was much longer than the 92-minute version that arrived in theaters in July.  I’m fairly certain that some of the excised material would have gone a long way towards clearing up some crucial questions I have about the characters, the world they inhabit and the film’s big plot twist.

Ah yes, the plot twist. Betcha you didn’t think you’d be getting one of those in this movie. Kudos to the Sony marketing team for keeping this secret so well hidden even as they drown the airwaves in Hancock ads. I’m not about to spoil things either, but I will say that the twist is a very interesting development that sends Hancock into unexpected territory for a comic-book movie.  But Hancock’s biggest sin is that it doesn’t take full advantage of the possibilities allowed by this plot development. One can only imagine what a skilled comic-book writer like Alan Moore or Brian Michael Bendis would have taken the story (actually, we don’t have to imagine anything—both of those writers already did variations on it in Miracleman and Powers respectively); Hancock’s masterminds just allow it to lie there onscreen. Their negligence robs the movie of any emotional impact and Smith’s performance of any internal consistency. Although the star does his best to keep up with the film’s constantly shifting tone, he can’t fill in the narrative gaps created in the editing room. Hancock is an almost good movie, but when it comes to being a superhero, “almost” isn’t good enough.

Extras: An on-set visual diary offers seven featurettes that profile various aspects of the film’s production, from the special effects to the costumes.  Also included is a digital copy of the film you can download to your desktop…provided you have a PC and not a Mac of course.  Apparently, Hancock has a mad-on for Steve Jobs.

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Also on DVD

Two days after it aired on TV, A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All (Comedy Central, $19.99)– Stephen Colbert’s uneven hour-long spoof of vintage television Christmas specials–arrives on DVD with several bonus features, including a 20-minute video of books burning on a yule log (not funny), a 25-day Advent Calendar with additional gags of Colbert (kind of funny), three alternate endings (funny) and a bonus music video (mostly funny).  Also making a quick trip to DVD is the TV-movie 24: Redemption (Fox, $26.98) which finds super-agent Jack Bauer hiding out in Africa, trying to avoid being drawn into yet another day-long attempt to thwart a terrorist plot.  Naturally, he can only stay one step ahead of trouble for so long before it catches up with him.  As a standalone movie, 24: Redemption is a solid action vehicle, but it’s even more enticing as a set-up for where the show’s next season will take the long-suffering Bauer.  A sneak preview of Season 7 included on the bonus features hint at some major plot twists and surprising reunions with familiar faces…including a few who supposedly died.  Finally, just in time for his latest film, Frost/Nixon, actor-turned-director Ron Howard gets a moment in the spotlight with an eight-disc box set, Ron Howard Spotlight Collection (Universal, $39.98).  Four of Howard’s nineteen features are included here, 1991′s Backdraft, 1995′s Apollo 13, 2001′s A Beautiful Mind (which won Best Picture and Howard his first Best Director statue) and 2005′s Cinderella Man.  All of the films come with numerous extras, including featurettes and commentary tracks.