Review: The Incredible Hulk

by Andy Hunsaker
Fancast Movies

I’ve already expressed my appreciation for the over-maligned Ang Lee Hulk, so it’s time to weigh in on the reboot that ups the action and dials down the quiet character studying. Being a longtime Hulk fan myself, I was skeptical and guessed that it was going to be dumbed-down at first, then over-excited when I began hearing reports that it might be on part with Iron Man, which felt like a flawless superhero film to me.

The fact that I watched the film unfold while continually waiting to be thrilled might have lifted my expectations beyond what they really should have been, but Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk left me feeling just a little bit out of sorts, and I’ve been spending the intervening days trying to figure out exactly why.

The story picks up on Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) five years into his life with the curse of this raging beast inside him. We get nothing in the way of illustrating why he’s got all this repressed anger, but Lee’s film went overboard dwelling on that, so they just did a reasonable origin recap at the beginning and basically said “he’s angry, let’s run with it.”

And run they did. Bruce is holed up in Brazil, trying to find his cure with the help of a mysterious contact known only as Mr. Blue (and Bruce himself, natch, is codenamed Mr. Green for all their encrypted internet conversations). But when an accident at the bottling factory where he works causes a drop of his special crazy blood to get mixed in with a citrus drink and giving Stan Lee gamma poisoning (an excellent cameo for The Man), General Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt) and the army follow that lead and pounce on Banner, sending him racing through the streets to try to elude them, all the while trying to keep his pulse from getting too high. It’s a great build-up of tension that illustrates Bruce’s struggle to keep an even keel, which is something at which he has to fail, or else we have no movie.

After the first encounter with the Green Goliath, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) is seriously intrigued. On loan from the British army as T-bolt’s field commando, Blonsky agrees to juice himself up with an experimental Super Soldier Serum to allow him to take the fight to the Hulk when next they meet. In the meantime, Bruce finds himself drawn back home towards Ross’ daughter Betty (Liv Tyler), the love of his life that he’s had to let go for all these years, in order to try and gather up all the initial data on his transformation while avoiding contact with her for her own good. That doesn’t quite work out as planned.

Betty Ross was written a bit closer to the real Betty Ross in this film - more the military brat who is definitely her father’s daughter as opposed to the soft spoken woman that Jennifer Connelly played, and Tyler got to play more of an active role in the story. That said, by the time the film was done, they had gone to the well so many times with the “Hulk sees Betty in danger and hulks out” scenario that it began to lose its punch.

Norton plays a fine Bruce Banner, and being hunted by the military makes for a better action-movie feel than Eric Bana’s slow-building frustration at listening to an insane Nick Nolte give crazy tidbits about childhood memories he’d repressed. The longing between Bruce and Betty is palpable, and I rather liked the fact that Betty doesn’t spare her current gentleman friend Leonard (Ty Burrell) a second thought once Bruce returns to her life. It’s a great dynamic, and she doesn’t even question the notion that she’s going to stick by Bruce and help him through this ordeal no matter what it takes. Tim Blake Nelson is also a great and funny supporting role as Dr. Sam Sterns, the mysterious little nerd-man behind the Mr. Blue persona who manages to out-science Bruce and offer a legitimate hope for his future freedom. He’s also set up nicely for who he is to become in a sequel. Giant mutated brains are always a quality ingredient.

Roth is good as Blonsky, however revamped the character is for the movie. As a fan of the source material, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed at the lack of Blonsky’s major pathos - the fact that he was stuck in the body of the Abomination and thus unable to ever reunite with his beloved wife again. That said, it’s sequel fodder, as he doesn’t even become the full-bore beast until just before the final fight. But without even a hint of it, I’m left to doubting. Hurt’s General Ross is actually more of a combination of characters, as the comic-book Ross just wanted to completely destroy the Hulk, while the new movie Ross wants to capture and weaponize the monster, which is motivation stripped from an obscure character named General Ryker. Considering that Ryker is the one responsible for the misbegotten Hulk dogs from the first film, perhaps it’s for the best that they didn’t include him - although head-butting at the top levels of the Pentagon could’ve made for another dramatic twist or two. Hurt himself does an admirable job, despite working under the unfortunate handicap of being unable to be as awesome as Sam Elliott.

This leaves the Hulk himself, the make-or-break factor. He’s darker, leaner and sleeker than the bright and bulging Hulk we used to know, and he moves a little less awkwardly. It’s well done, for the most part. That said, I didn’t really notice any significant improvement overall in the CG technology since 2003. I’ll need to see it again to be sure, thanks to all the quick movement, but the final battle had some moments where the Hulk seemed almost gelatinous. Also, most everything in the final cut seemed to have already been showcased in the trailers and clips, so there wasn’t really much in the way of surprise in the Hulk action, although that might just be a function of me being too close to the biz. Here’s hoping for an extended edition DVD. Lou Ferrigno, however, did a great job delivering what little Hulk dialog there was to give, even if the beast didn’t have quite the emotional heft of the first film.

Overall, The Incredible Hulk is a pretty good time, and it gives the people what they want - a lot more action and a lot of smashing stuff. I liked it, but I can tell right now that I’ve got a difficult future ahead of me as being one of the small minority that prefers Lee’s take on the story. There’s nothing in this new film that trumps the perfect desert fight sequence in the first film. You can’t top the Hulk biting the head off a missile and spitting it at a helicopter to blow it out of the sky.