Hard-hitting humor...

Rating: 10/10 (11 July 2008)

The hard-hitting humor is the saving grace: it makes what might've been just another celluloid superhero flick something worth watching. (IRON MAN also boasts what is by far the funniest Stan Lee cameo appearance ever.) Like L. Frank Baum's Tin Woodsman, Tony Stark is in search of a heart- and he finds it. It's refreshing in a big budget fx fest to find a soft, chewy caramel center. Unfortunately, the producers of THE INCREDIBLE HULK (the latest version) weren't quite as capable of finding said center. Good, but by no means the achievement that IRON MAN is, THE INCREDIBLE HULK reminded me more than a little of the original SUPERMAN serial (with Kirk Alyn), wherein our hero literally transformed into a cartoon every time he took to the skies. (I don't recall that happening in the original CAPTAIN MARVEL serial, nor the ROCKET MAN serials.) By excising the bothersome human element, the producers of THE INCREDIBLE HULK have simply given us another cgi cartoon crowded with real folks who seem oddly out of place.