The incredi-bore Hulk

Rating: 4/10 (23 November 2008)

OK let me get this straight, I absolutely hate the "Hulk" movie by Ang Lee. It was slow, melodramatic, poorly acted, and silly looking. It's no surprise that the studios decided to forget the first Hulk movie ever happened. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have learned from their errors, because after five years of waiting we get another Hulk movie that is almost as slow, melodramatic, poorly acted, and silly looking as the other one.
The one thing that is fairly decent is the action itself. It's by no means great, there are a lot of anti-climaxes and it's not very suspenseful to see nearly-invincible heroes in action, but it does have its moments.
Sadly, there isn't all that much action though, which would not be such a big problem if there was something else in lieu of the action. Whereas a similar movie like Iron Man had fun characters, a lot of humor, and a serviceable story, "The Incredible Hulk" has, well, nothing.
Seriously, this movie is virtually plot less. Hulk fights, hulk escapes, hulk gets found again, hulk fights. Rinse and repeat. The editing is all over the place, whole chunks of the movie seem to have gone missing, resulting in sloppiness like the Hulk being in Rio one moment, and thousands of miles away in Nicaragua the next. It's almost like they didn't have a script due to the screen writer's strike and just made something up on the spot, then added dramatic music to every scene to cover up the fact that nothing actually happens.
The actors are doing their best I suppose, but even Edward Norton cannot save the horribly dry and cliché dialog. The characters are all wooden, and miss any kind of motivation. Why on earth did the military guy, Blonksy, suddenly want to be the bad guy, it felt totally random just like about everything else in this movie, and I'm not even talking about the totally anticlimactic and nonsensical way the bad guy is defeated.
Maybe I'm expecting a bit too much from a "mindless" action movie, but "Hulk" obviously tries to be a bit more than just mindless action, and fails spectacularly in that aspect. It's not as cringe-inducingly bad as the Ang Lee version, it's just profoundly dull.