Genre: adventure, action, sci-fi, horror, drama

The Hulk

Directed by Ang Lee

Written by James Schamus, Michael France and John Turman

Starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Nick Nolte

Classification: PG

Rating: **½

When a director of great talent takes on an artifact of comic book culture, something usually has to give. Sometimes, it's the artifact, which gets changed for the better -- witness Tim Burton's work in the original Batman. Sometimes, it's the director, who gets put through the wringer -- remember Robert Altman's struggles with Popeye. But in the strange case of Ang Lee versus The Hulk, the verdict isn't nearly as clear -- hell, it's downright murky.

Of course, this particular melding of the genres doubles as a meeting of the Lees -- Ang the celebrated auteur and Stan the famous pulpmeister. Introductions over, here's what the director does. On one hand, drawing upon his keen intelligence and stylistic gifts, he squeezes the Marvel comic into a cinematic shape intriguingly unlike any you've seen before. On the other, he squeezes so hard that there isn't much juice left in the pulp fiction. The result is a picture every bit as divided as its hulking hero -- essentially, this is a movie at war with itself.

There's no sign of the battle early on. Establishing the backstory, Lee is in perfect command. He starts us out circa 1966, at a military lab deep in the American badlands. There, a child is born in pain. There too, a father -- genetic engineer cum mad scientist -- is up to no good. Cut to the present, when the baby has grown into Bruce Banner (Eric Bana), a rather oafish nerd toiling in a high-tech lab of his own. Beside him, Betty (Jennifer Connelly) lines up as his savvy colleague and pretty ex-girlfriend -- their never-torrid affair has degenerated into a merely tepid friendship.

Cue the accident, where Bruce gets pelted with a stream of errant gamma rays, thereby "unleashing what was already there." Which is? His inner brute, natch. Call it Caliban or call it King Kong or call Dr. Freud and conclude it's the mighty Id in all its raging glory. Yep, the Hulk, that scowling green giant in the purple undies. But where did it come from? Let's just say that the sins of the father have been visited upon the son. And since Daddy is none other than a dead-eyed and dishevelled Nick Nolte, looking as wasted as his infamous mug shot, that's a powerful lot of sin to shoulder -- a fact that Lee isn't about to let us forget.

So these early, pre-"hulking out" scenes are drenched in a moody menace. The psychology may be dime-store Freud, but Lee has decked out the shop in a priceless array of wizardly technique -- wipes, dissolves and split-screens that go way beyond their usual gimmickry, neatly hinting at both the vibrant panels of the comic-book and the schizoid personality of our tormented hero. Equally inventive, and disturbing, is the imagery, like the parched desert transformed into a Dali-esque dreamscape.

Or like the sight of a mushroom cloud exploding within a single human cell -- how better to depict an ominous genetic inheritance? Even his flashbacks are fresh. At one point, Bruce caresses an old snapshot of Betty, which comes to life and in turn retreats yet another step into the past -- layers of repressed memory unfolding before us. Also, the casting of a relative unknown in the lead role is an inspired touch -- Bana, with his mildly pockmarked face fronting a wholly uncharismatic manner, makes for an ideal Everyman, and Anyman's screwed-up son.

To this stage, despite the Marvel-ous source material, Lee is on very familiar thematic terrain. Each of his previous films -- the "Father Knows Best" saga of the Asian trilogy, the Regency drawing-rooms of Sense and Sensibility, the Watergate-era suburbia of The Ice Storm, the Civil War of Ride With the Devil, the martial rituals of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon -- revolves around some form of domestic strife.

His characters are either bumping up against the rigid strictures of an ordered world or struggling to define the nebulous rules of a disordered world. This time, where order and disorder mingle in a single psyche, he's pushed the internal strife into sombre territory that borders on the surreal.

But this is a still a comic book in origin, which means that psychology must inevitably give way to action. It does, at first briefly and then extensively, whenever weird little Bruce morphs into the great big Hulk -- a computer-generated behemoth who appears amazingly realistic in his many close-ups. Ironically, that becomes part of the problem.

Whereas the psychology is surreal and wonderfully fluid, the action is too real and surprisingly listless, displaying little of the kinetic zip, or the sheer lyricism, that Lee brought with such memorable effect to Crouching Tiger.

Consequently, the movie comes to a virtual stop every time the monster within gets let out. And since it's let out for almost the entirety of a windy last act -- chased by helicopters, stomping on tanks, bounding over the badlands like a super ball with a thyroid condition -- that adds up to a bunch of stop signs and some major gridlock. Odder still, the monster isn't especially monstrous. Jolly the fellow ain't, but, in most other regards, he could be a kissing cousin to the guy on the can of niblets. Come to think of it, Bruce in his natural state looks a lot creepier than the Hulk in full gallop. The competing halves of the film are so unbalanced -- the psychology engrossing, the action mundane -- that Lee ends up rewriting Freud: Damned if the Ego doesn't seem more primal than the Id.

Ultimately, then, that meeting of the Lees proves a curious colloquy. Ang has the arty smarts, Stan has the pop wiles -- now if only they could get on the same page.