Jun. 11, 2008 - Issue #660: Hot Summer Guide 2008

The Incredible Hulk

Hulk trash! Incredible this certainly ain’t

It might be time for Marvel to give up and recognize that the Hulk just doesn’t work outside of a comic book setting. Ignoring the two completely pathetic TV shows, it turns out Ang Lee’s roundly (and somewhat unjustly) reviled Hulk is probably the smarter cinematic way to handle the character: the big, dumb green guy that goes “SMASH!” isn’t really all that compelling, even while smashing, whereas the meek, mild-mannered man trying to cope with the terrifying awesomeness of the demon within at least gets the brain working enough to keep you watching.
 

Or at least that’s the impression left by the Zak Penn/Edward Norton-scripted The Incredible Hulk, which trades Lee’s pensive style for a mixture of CGI smash-ups, extended chase scenes and that terrible, hacky Marvel humour that had Tobey Maguire doing that Panic at the ’70s Disco bit in the third Spider-man. Unsuprisingly, the film is a two-hour bore for it.
 

A lot of the blame for that actually rests with Norton, and not just because he evidently did constant rewrites on the script—Penn isn’t exactly a savant, but his X2 and X3 scripts were sharp, even if Brett Ratner killed the latter, and this thing is drowning in horrific, wooden dialogue and shoddy pacing. No, the bigger problem here is that Norton plays Bruce Banner like the inner demon he’s trying to quell is the one that made him lie about his adjusted monthly income on his 2004 tax return. Sure, Banner is supposed to be a bit of a stiff—Hulk is the id to his superego, and all that—but Norton has precisely zero screen charisma throughout, a fact that’s only emphasized if you’re reminded of Robert Downey Jr’s incredible turn in Iron Man, which the film actually does a few times (more on that in a sec).

 

Not that Norton gets a whole lot of help. William Hurt, the driven general who wants to use the Hulk as a weapon, chokes out his lines like he’s in the stuttering ’60s cartoon, while Liv Tyler does her best to out-bland Norton as love interest Betty Ross, and succeeds wildly: there’s more chemistry between the CGI Hulk and Abomination (Tim Roth, who’s fine if one-note) than there is between Banner and Ross.
 

Actually, one of the two things that Hulk does well is its visual effects, which actually are fairly incredible: the Abomination is a crazed hell demon on steroids, while the Hulk manages to work both as punishingly physical brute and suprisingly endearing—hell, occasionally cute—tragic hero, in large part because both animations seem real enough to touch.

The other thing it manages to do is serve as one long prequel to the forthcoming Avengers film, with sly references to Captain America and Iron Man tucked in, including (spoiler alert, not that you should bother to see this anyway) a cameo from Tony Stark that’s easily the most entertaining minute of the movie (end spoiler). Outside that, though, this is just a slog interspersed with occasional smashing—a big, green dud smack in the middle of a summer full of much more promising, far more interesting superhero flicks. V 
 

Opens Fri, Jun 13

The Incredible Hulk

Directed by Louis Leterrier

Written by Zak Penn, Edward Norton

Starring Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth

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