Hancock 2 Stars—Will Smith has owned Fourth of July weekends with huge debuts for some passable but not-so-great movies, and he’ll likely do it again with this foul-mouthed-misanthrope-as-superhero flick. The movie has a crisp, entertaining set up: Smith is a superhero who hates everyone and is hated in turn for the chaos he causes. With nowhere to go after that, the filmmakers let the story devolve into a lame variation of the very action genre they aimed to flip on its head. While everyone in Los Angeles may hate their resident dude with superpowers, the always likable, always bankable Smith makes you love Hancock. Looking more homeless than heroic, Smith’s Hancock goes about saving people with a bad, bad attitude—until he rescues an earnest public relations man (Jason Bateman) who sets out to give him an image-makeover. Charlize Theron co-stars as Bateman’s wife, who wants Hancock to stay away from her family. After starting so fresh, the movie turns into a poor impersonation of a standard superhero tale. Because Smith inspires such kinship, you wish director Peter Berg and his team had provided better material to let him show off his charm. PG-13 for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language. 92 min.—David Germain



WALL-E 3 1/2 Stars—Within the rumbling, stumbling hunk of junk that is WALL-E beats the sweetest, warmest heart—a robotic representation of humanity’s highest potential. And within this futuristic sci-fi adventure lies an artistic truth: that Pixar’s track record remains impeccable. Following high-concept movies about a superhero family and a gourmet rat, this is the Disney computer animation arm’s boldest experiment yet. “WALL-E” is essentially a silent film in which the two main characters, a mismatched pair of robots, communicate through bleeps and blips and maybe three words between them. And yet director and co-writer Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo”) is resourceful enough to find infinite ways for them to express themselves—amusingly, achingly, and with emotional precision. Ben Burtt, a two-time Oscar winner who created R2-D2’s signature sound effects in the “Star Wars” movies, provides the “voice” of WALL-E, or Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class. Seven hundred years after Earth was abandoned, WALL-E is still doing the job he was programmed to do: pick up all the trash that was left behind and compress it into tidy packages. But he’s a romantic at heart with an eye for nostalgia, sifting through garbage for items like bowling pins, a Rubik’s Cube, an iPod, a spork. It’s only upon the arrival of the sleek, shiny Eve (voiced by Elissa Knight), a robot sent back to the planet on a search mission, that he realizes how lonely he’s been. Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger and Kathy Najimy provide some of the human voices, with Fred Willard appearing as a corporate CEO with typically humorous buffoonery. G. 97 min.—Christy Lemire



Wanted 3 Stars—The movie is called “Wanted” and the star is Angelina Jolie. No, it is not a documentary. It is, in fact, a super-stylized, wildly outlandish action flick that will pick you up, throw you around, drop you back down on the ground and leave you begging for more. It’s the ideal, mindless summer thrill ride—one that you can’t take too seriously, even when it starts to take itself too seriously. Based on the graphic novel by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, “Wanted” follows the transformation of Wesley Gibson (the increasingly versatile James McAvoy) from miserable cubicle dweller to master assassin. Jolie, as the aptly named Fox, yanks him from his dreary life and introduces him to The Fraternity, a secret society of freakishly skilled, highly trained killers—of whom his late father, the man he never knew, was the best of the best. Intimidating dudes with names like The Butcher and The Exterminator oversee his schooling—which mainly consists of beating him bloody to toughen him up—led by the courtly Sloan (Morgan Freeman, toying with his deeply etched, gracious persona). Kazakhstan-born director Timur Bekmambetov clearly had a blast emptying his own clip of filmmaking tricks: sped-up sequences, slo-mo, curving bullets that defy the laws of gravity and physics. And he serves up one tremendous car chase that will make you apprehensive about driving through Chicago anytime soon. Sure, you’ve seen a lot of this type of stuff before in the “Matrix” series, for example. It doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. R for strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language and some sexuality. 110 min.—Christy Lemire



RATINGS: 4 stars: Excellent; 3 stars: Good; 2 stars: Fair; 1 star: Poor