The Incredible Hulk
Directed by Louis Leterrier
Written by Zak Penn
Starring Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, William Hurt and Tim Roth
Classification: PG
**
With a surfeit of hit movies in the past few years about large, angry, green characters (three Shrek movies, one Hulk and Al Gore's film), is another one really necessary? Popularly described as a "reboot" of a proposed Hulk franchise, The Incredible Hulk is the second movie about one of Marvel Comics' most popular characters in the last four years, following Ang Lee's 2004 Hulk, a stylized and Freudian-layered fantasy, paradoxically aimed at people who don't care for comic books. After a good opening weekend, that Hulk sank.
Marvel seems anxious to make sure that "Hulk not smash" doesn't happen again. The new Incredible Hulk, directed by journeyman French action director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter) with a screenplay by Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand), works hard to counter the errors of the earlier movie, replacing talk with action, and Lee's stabs at originality with familiar, derivative story elements.
Structured as a fugitive film, the movie's about two-thirds Bourne-style chase and battles using lots of military hardware. The movie targets comic fans, with references to the Bill Bixby series and other Marvel comics, including a last-minute not-so-secret cameo from Robert Downey as Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, who provides the most electrifying minute in the film.
Playing characters familiar to the fans, we have William Hurt as a blustering general, Tim Blake Nelson as a kooky scientist and Tim Roth as an evil soldier who morphs into a monster. All of them seem to be directing themselves.
In the few quiet moments, there's a brief flutter of quiet romance between Edward Norton as timid scientist Bruce Banner and Liv Tyler (surprisingly fine) as his biology-professor girlfriend Betty Ross. And when the Hulk isn't raging, there are moments of big-guy pathos blatantly lifted from Frankenstein and King Kong movies.
Wasting little time on back story, the movie offers an opening credit montage that's the equivalent of the first half-page of a comic book to re-introduce the characters: Banner is the subject of a gamma-ray experiment that goes wrong. It leaves his girlfriend injured, her father, General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (Hurt, huffing beneath his mustache), on the warpath, and Bruce with a condition that affects his bulk, temper and pigmentation: When annoyed or excited, he becomes large, green and angry. Actually, the new movie even has that down to a formula - when pulse hits 200, Bruce inflates.
We first meet Banner, looking pale, mild and thin as a crescent moon, living a monastic existence in a Rio de Janeiro slum. He's working a day job at a bottling plant while seeking help on the Internet from the mysterious Mr. Blue (Nelson) about his condition and studying with a Brazilian martial-arts instructor. (Could the Hulk be learning the fight-dancing techniques of capoeira? No such luck.)
Fortunately for the movie, Banner's self-control falls apart when he's attacked by bald, sneering Brazilian thugs at exactly the same time General Ross has rolled an army into Brazil to capture Hulk. Ross wants to use him for a biotech "super soldier" project. Hulk angry, Hulk smash, Hulk escape.
When he recovers, Banner decides to head back to the United States to examine the original research data from the experiment that led to his condition. In a quick ellipsis that leaves out the border-jumping refugee experiences, Banner arrives at Culver University (played by the University of Toronto) where the data is kept and, coincidentally, where his old flame Betty is now a professor.
As Bruce arrives back on American soil, the script begins to adopt a more jocular tone. Betty and Bruce meet, although they don't exactly consummate their affair. "I can't get too excited," warns Bruce, like a teenaged virgin on the verge. (Apparently, if one part of his anatomy swells, everything else follows suit.) The couple sleep in separate beds staring mournfully at the ceiling.
Later, the general attacks the university with tanks and supersonic gunships, which somehow makes the TV news as a "rumour." Among Ross's henchmen is the Russian-born agent Emil Blonsky (Roth), who is so impressed with the Hulk's powers that he has had himself injected with some gamma radiation. Soon, he transforms into his monster alter-ego, a spiny-backed humanoid (dubbed Abomination in the comic books) with an unhealthily large appetite for destruction.
Get ready for a rumble in Harlem that represents an urban-renewal project on a mass scale. Since the trashing, smashing and crashing is what the fans are paying for, The Incredible Hulk is essentially a 20-minute action tail wagging an hour-and-a-half dog of a movie that precedes it. The fight scene is reasonably imaginative, in a distinctly Saturday-morning-cartoon sort of way.
The new Hulk, who has sinews and bulges (and, curiously, Tom Cruise's haircut), is unquestionably better than the big green beach ball bouncing through Lee's film, though he's not entirely convincing. As long as he's coyly covered by girders and buildings in night scenes, he's reasonably effective, but in daylight, Hulk has the rough sheen of a plastic water bottle.
Nor does the computer-generated creature have much connection to his human host. In the first film, Lee worked hard to suggest the Hulk was part of Banner's psyche. Here, it's more like a cancer that he's desperate to get out of his body. Reportedly, Norton contributed to the script and disagreed with the producers over the final cut. It's easy to see why. Norton (Primal Fear, Fight Club) is a specialist in characters with conflicted identities. Here, he's limited to one emotion - repressed. You might as well cast Keanu Reeves in the part.
Another good but wasted actor, Roth, is absurdly cast. At one point he says, in his no-fixed-address accent: "If I could know what I know now and put it in the body I had 10 years ago, then I'd be someone I wouldn't want to fight." Coming from Arnold Schwarzenegger, we might buy it.
Astute fans may detect a whiff of studio formula here. Like Iron Man, Banner went to a foreign country, blew up a lot of military hardware, returned home to his lady love, was hounded by a menacing father type, and clashed with his monstrous alter-ego in a fight that destroyed many cars and buildings.
Personally, it wasn't until returning home from the movie that I felt my own pulse jump, after I checked the Marvel website. I learned there are "more than 5,000 high-profile characters" in the company's superhero universe.
At the current rate of one movie a month, that means we could be at this for more than 400 years, not counting reboots or sequels.
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