The Incredible Hulk User Reviews

• Add

The Incredible Hulk is anything but. General audiences may enjoy the loud battles, the massive amounts of destruction, and the screaming mass of two green monsters fighting it out. However, general audiences aren't readers of the comic or know the how the comic use to play out. Hulk was never a real action hero. He began as the alternate side of a man trying to remove, contain, or control something that is triggered off his emotions.

The movie opens up well enough. The first thirty minutes were exactly as I would have hoped the rest of the movie would have been. Everything that happened during the South American section of the film was what it should be. Thoughtful, strategic, insightful, and comedic.

An alienated Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is trying to learn the language, hold a job, and find a cure. He is doing this all while on the run from the United States military, laying low in a closet sized apartment. There is a beautiful chase sequence through a crowded Brazilian city.

For the first part of the movie, I felt like I was watching the old television show which starred Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. Whatever doubt I had about the story and origin rewrite that the movie was doing to escape the 2003 Ang Lee Hulk movie (which I loved) started to fade away.

Then the movie went back to the crowded city of New York. This was where the movie suddenly fell apart. Gone was the thought provoking stuff of a man on the run. Suddenly, Mr. Green was all over the screen. Edward Norton's roll seemed to vanish into nothingness, and computer effects took over.

During the last hour and a half of the film, I found myself bored. Watching CG fighting with CG monsters. CG cars being ripped apart and thrown and CG buildings. I remembered why it was that Spiderman 3 irritated me, and why the Lord of the Rings films bored me.

No matter how good it looks, CG may allow you to do a lot more, but when you use too much, it doesn't replace the acting ability of a real person or the feel of seeing something actually break or splatter or explode.

The Incredible Hulk takes out what makes the Marvel character so good to begin with. It removed the fear of a being that is uncontrollable getting loose because of the faintest offset of anger or raw emotional overdrive.

This isn't to say that the movie is without its merits. There are a few inventive parts. I particularly enjoyed the scene where him and Betty start to have an intimate moment, only to have him have to stop because he is getting way too excited. It added a bit more depth to the character, and made for a scene that brought about some degree of smiles, and pity. It just felt like they were trying to hard to make a summer action film and forgetting that it takes more than explosions and carnage to entertain some.

Banner says that he doesn't remember anything but fragments and images, and that controlling it is not something he wants as well as outside of his reach at this moment. Then why is it that the Hulk manages to fight what became of Tim Roth's character in New York? Why wasn't he just going on a monstrous rampage? Why was the Abomination able to have full speech and mind control over himself when he was exposed to basically the same formula?

While I didn't enjoy The Incredible Hulk, there are plenty others who will, or do, or did. I can't change their minds, nor do I intend to. The Incredible Hulk does what someone who doesn't like to have depth and thought in a movie will enjoy.

While comparing it to 2003's Hulk is unfair as they are two totally different movies, I have to say that I enjoyed Ang Lee's version better. It was a thought provoking film that played more like a Hitchcock movie than an action film.