Underwhelming

Rating: 6/10 (24 September 2008)

The Incredible Hulk is no doubt an ideal version of the Hulk saga for those who found Ang Lee's version too contemplative and overstylized. In fact, I have very picky comic book fanatic friends who thought it hit the nail on the head. But to me, on top of being understylized, it failed to deal with the interesting facets of Stan Lee's character. The backstory is itemized through flashbacks which are generally in the opening credits. William Hurt's mad Army general took on radiation expert Bruce Banner to revitalize WWII military bio-force enhancement research. Banner exposed himself to gamma radiation, which causes him to transform into a colossal green monster, and the hospitalization the general's daughter, a cellular biologist who was Banner's colleague and, naturally, his lover. Instantly a renegade from the U.S. Army, Banner has eluded them for five years.
Not all of us are writers, and The Incredible Hulk is not the sort of movie seen by people who take the existence of a writer into account, but let us really try to consider the dilemma of creating a story about the Hulk. You are taking in hand two different characters: Good- natured scientist Bruce Banner, and the berserk, devastating Hulk, who explodes into flurries of raging onslaught whenever he's annoyed, which is normally because the U.S. Army is more often than not wracking him with automatic weapons and missiles and tanks. There is still the remarkable uncertainty of whether or not Banner is actually cognizant within his Mr. Hyde. In the Ang Lee version, he was, relatively. In this version by Louis Leterrier, director of another disaster movie, Transporter 2, the most sufficient Edward Norton's vague, mostly closed-lipped Banner can supply is that being the Hulk is like an acid trip, and all he can evoke are abstract splinters of events.
Ang Lee's disastrously received Hulk was to a certain extent inspired in the way it arranged the Hulk tale into harmonizing clashes with repressive father figures: Betty was dismayed by her father, the general, and Banner agonized as a consequence of the Hulk genes originally created by his father, a scientist who passed them along to his child.
In this forgettable by-the-numbers summer blockbuster, Betty, now the consistently underwhelming Liv Tyler, still has significant troubles with her father the general, now William Hurt, owing to his ludicrous campaign to utilize the Hulk formula and generate a line of Hulk soldiers. Throughout the movie, Hurt so rashly and uncontrollably drenches countless square miles of open space in his military capability that one can only doubt if he has a senior officer with anything to say about having to answer for the indefinite mass of casualties of flinging endless fire at the Hulk with an utter lack of any benefit. Even if they did have some effect on the Hulk, how does that serve their cause really? If Hulk is dead, where's the Hulk formula? And again, Betty and Banner are in love, but don't follow through because the whole Hulk issue is a big concern, although I admit to a clever moment that brings enlightening insight to the Hulk story: Banner cuts short his great opening to have sex with her because when his heart rate exceeds a certain point, he becomes the Hulk.
The film flaunts an astounding early shot, not so much for any technical virtuosity but really for its exposure to a beautiful locale as we soar above a hill in Rio de Janeiro, seeing thousands of microscopic, colorful shacks crowding each other. After that, Leterrier's movie, unlike his Transporter 2, is not downright bad, for it has a diverting enough plot turn regarding a Russian special ops expert played by Tim Roth whose function is to become the bad Hulk, only with a mutated cranium to boot, and the movie has a clever little device at the end. It is essentially that the movie is so light, shallow, and only entertaining to a similar degree as a Luc Besson film, which, aptly enough is with whom Leterrier has worked on two previous films, Unleashed and the aforementioned catastrophe of a sequel. The fact is Lou Ferrigno not only has a cameo as a security guard but also evidently does the voiced over roars of Norton's Hulk.
I have yet to understand why such a capable actor like Edward Norton would not only star in but script doctor The Incredible Hulk. After an immaculate string of performances in Primal Fear, Rounders, American History X, Fight Club, 25th Hour, Frida, and even Death To Smoochy, it is almost as if he wanted a break from doing so many high-quality movies and a walk-through, generic-mean genre pleasure like The Incredible Hulk.