(Spoiler warning--some major plot details are revealed in this article. Stop reading now if you want to see the movie without knowing the outcome. However by the time you've read this article you may not want to see it anyway.)

"Hancock" (the current vehicle for the biggest star in the world, Will Smith) is a superhero story that, on the surface, seems to offer something different to the super-spider-xmen films of the recent past. "Hancock's" protagonist is a drink-sodden flying strongman with amnesia. So far, so not your average underwear-on-the-outside embodiment of truth, justice, etc. Sadly, beneath the surface of this blockbuster beats a hollow heart, that not only adds little or nothing to our vision of what a hero can be, but reinforces the notion that more often than not, popular cinema's vision of heroism begins and ends with whoever can overwhelm the bad guy with the most spectacular force.

The genesis of "Hancock" might have gone something like this:

• Let's do a movie about a superhero who doesn't know where he came from, or why he's here.

• Let's do a movie about a superhero who wakes up regularly drunk and depressed, and causes mayhem every time he tries to save someone, leaving a trail of metallic wreckage throughout the urban landscape.

• Let's make him unique: an unpopular superhero. Let's put him on the receiving end of anger from the public, and in need of some redemption.

• Let's mix things up a bit by making his only friend married to a beautiful woman who feels a little strange around our protagonist.

• Let's make the revelation at the centre of our story be that this superhero is the most truly tragic superhero in movie history. Let's make him a lonely amnesiac who has been suffering an identity crisis for over eighty years; and let's make the beautiful woman his wife of several thousand years, who, like him, does not age because she cannot. She has left him alone because--in a twist that is potentially up there with "The Usual Suspects", "The Crying Game" and "The Sixth Sense"--she is his superhero pair, and they have discovered that even though they love each other, when they are in physical proximity, their powers weaken, and they are vulnerable to attack.

• Let's end the story with both of them nearly dead at the hands of their enemy, and deciding to part in order to save each other.

• If all goes according to plan, it will be that rare thing: a mainstream Hollywood movie that manages to be both entertaining and artful, dramatic and intelligent; honest on its own terms.

And, to a degree, the film succeeds--it's entertaining, a bit of a laugh, and there are some plot elements that haven't been done to death in a hundred other movies of its type. There's also an attempt at presenting the central character as a caricature of US foreign policy, or a ridiculously over-the-top satirical version of President Bush. But this potentially interesting idea is buried beneath the indecision of the rest of the movie.

The potential pathos of a superhero whose actions have real consequences, for himself and the world, sadly, is set aside in favor of a tone of schoolboyish humor, including the most absurd and grotesque bodily function joke I've ever seen, and climaxes with an act of violence that would not be out of place in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." It's a pity the completed film squanders its own possibilities, with its treatment of the questions of power and responsibility, and most especially, the notion of how so-called "heroes" and other public figures are often scape-goated by the rest of us. Will Smith is a talented and often enjoyable screen presence; his director Peter Berg has some genuine cinematic flair (and made one of the best sports movies of recent years in "Friday Night Lights"); Jason Bateman is a natural comic and Charlize Theron deserved her Oscar a few years ago; but cinema, produced by industrialists, by way of focus groups, will always reduce to the lowest common denominator. Though I still think a mass audience could have coped just fine with "Hancock" being something other than "Superman III" meets "American Pie."

Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com.