The Incredile Hulk

It seems that one's opinion of the rebooted Incredible Hulk is inexorably linked to one's opinion of Ang Lee's Hulk of 2003, of which the new version is a sort of quasi-sequel. Folks who thought that Lee's version, with its somber tone and Freudian themes, was a bold, visionary attempt to make a comic book movie into something substantive seem to find this new hulk to a be a much dumber, sadder, less interesting beast. Those who found Lee's version to be a load of ponderous horseshit, on the other hand, welcome a Hulk movie that glories in the spectacle of Hulk smashing things.


For the record, I think Ang Lee's Hulk is a goddamn disaster. Yes! I know that he was trying to add symbolic and emotional resonance to a comic book film, but moviemaking isn't the Special Olympics: you don't get credit for trying. Lee's Hulk, like Bryan Singer's Superman Returns failed because the creator failed to appreciate the genre. The Superhero icon is an expansive trope that can accomodate all sorts of musings on culture and psychology, but it's also extremely fragile. If you graft your personal cinematic obsessions onto a comic book character, you'll likely end up crushing it under the weight of your intellectual pretensions. Ang Lee's entire film ouvre is a meditation on repression, and so he turned Bruce Banner into a man struggling with a gamma-radiated Oedipus Complex. Now, that's a bold move, but it's bound to fail if you shoot a film in which the main character periodically turns into a giant green CGI monster with all of the joyless brooding of Brokeback Mountain.


Marvel Studios learned their lesson from that, so they got the dude who directed The Transporter to make a more smash-centric Hulk. But this new Hulk underscores another potential pitfall of the comic book genre: bland proficiency. The new Hulk possesses none of the faults of the Ang Lee version, but neither does it boast any sort of discernable point of view. Maybe effective ass-kicking and artistic vision are mutually exclusive in the comic book film genre, and if so, I guess if I had to have one, it would be effective ass-kicking. Yes, Virginia, I am a Philistine. But I'm going to watch a movie featuring a giant green monster, I'd rather watch him rip a police car in half and use the pieces as boxing gloves than watch Eric Bana look angst-riddled for two hours. Most of this new Hulk film is servicable if not great: Ed Norton is charismatic as the harried Bruce Banner, his inhibited romance with Liv Tyler's Betty Ross carries a bit of heft and the special effects are convincing. A big showdown between the Hulk and Gen. Ross's army unit is marred a bit by some clumsy editing, but the film really earns its keep in the last reel, when the Hulk goes toe to toe in the streets of Harlem with supersoldier Emil Blonsky's mutated Abomination. It's the kind of climax that is too rare in the comic movie universe: an action set piece that highlights everything that is awesome about the iconic
character the film is based around. Hulk smashes, he crashes, he claps his hands and creates a sonic boom, he punches the ground and creates a mini-earthquake, it's all enough to give a guy a nerdgasm. For all the movie snob posturing about the merits of a "cerebral" (read: boring) approach to comic material, there's something to be said for revelling in the mindless but thrilling vulgarity of pulp spectacle.

Score: 7.2