So different from other movies in MCU that it almost seems non-canon

Rating: 7/10 (27 June 2016)

Iron Man was a great start of Marvel Cinematic Universe that gets you excited to see more. The second outing is The Incredible Hulk which stars Edward Norton as Bruce Banner a.k.a. The Hulk. Hulk appears in some other movies in MCU, but he's never played by Edward Norton again and is replaced by Mark Ruffalo, and also Hulk never looks the way he does in this movie again and all that makes it seem like Marvel decided to ignore this movie. Which is strange, because this movie is actually pretty decent.
It's not as good as most of the MCU movies that are out by now, but what I liked about it is that they actually tried something different and this is probably the only movie in MCU's Phase One that actually took itself completely seriously. Who says it always has to be cheesy with jokes in the middle of the battle? Characters are fleshed out pretty well and Norton's portrayal of Hulk shows us what being Hulk really is like. It's not cool, it's not awesome. In fact, it's terrible. He doesn't want to be this way and I think it's very well shown. The Hulk also looks very menacing and scary and the villain, Abomination, even more. But still, no matter how much mayhem he causes sometimes, he's just misunderstood and I heard Norton was involved in some creative process, so that was probably him. The problem with this movie is that the story itself isn't memorable enough. At least for me. They had a good idea, showing how Bruce Banner struggles with Hulk, but they could still do more with all that. The effects also don't look as believable as they should and considering how big the budget was, it's not really a good thing. But one more good thing is that it's not setting up anything except in the last scene so it's not distracting and this movie can be easily seen as a stand- alone.
The movie itself isn't bad. It tried to have a more serious approach and that made me appreciate it a lot. The problem is that it's just not that memorable and that's the reason while it's almost the weakest movie in MCU.