A solid comic book movie that grows on you.

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2011)

This re-booting of The Hulk begins with Bruce Banner working in a bottling plant in Brazil, on the run from the US authorities and seeking a cure to his rampaging alter-ego. Edward Norton takes over from Eric Bana in the central role and does well at capturing the vulnerable Banner - and he gets the best joke in the movie due to his sketchy knowledge of Portugeuse. I won't spoil it but a knowledge of the 70s TV show helps.
Liv Tyler is Banner's love interest Betty Ross, and William Hurt plays General Thunderbolt Ross, here given a darker side as it's revealed his character wants to use the technique that created the Hulk as a military weapon. Ross calls in Emil Blonsky, a Russian-born British Intelligence operative to help take Banner down. And it's Blonsky who gradually emerges as the real villain of the piece.
Banner must journey to New York to meet a mysterious scientist "Mr. Blue" who may be able to develop a cure for the Hulk, but learns little along the way. Ross father and daughter feel pretty one-dimensional. Roth, an unlikely cock-er-ney Russian, is pretty effective. By no means a standard comic book bad guy, he has more complexity to his character than usual, and compares well with, say, Micky Rourke's undercooked villain in Iron Man 2, Some of the plot points feel a little forced; yet the action is well mounted and director Louis Leterrier manages some impressive sequences. As in Iron Man the action is never allowed to dominate the story. We even get a brief reprise of the "Banner moving on" theme from the TV. show.
The final battle between the Hulk and the newly gamma-powered Blonsky, however, is something of a let down, with little imagination applied. It merely consists of the two titans whacking each other a lot into buildings etc. The big character revelation moment for the Hulk is similarly mishandled. The Cgi is a big improvement on Ang Lee's Hulk, with the green Goliath feeling physically solid this time out. There's also a nice moment with Hulk and Betty sheltering from a storm in a cave - something taken directly from the comic in the Stan Lee years. Yep, Stan the Man, who's now been in more of these films than Hitchcock in his own movies, amusingly cameos again.
This is a pretty good effort; in the year of the Dark Knight and Iron Man The Incredible Hulk was somewhat overlooked. But I viewed if for the second time recently and it still holds up. Don't expect the adjective "Incredible" and you will probably like it. I certainly did.