A roaring commercial success

Rating: Null/10 (14 June 2008)

"Roaring" is a deliberate reference to what the Hulk did, maybe a couple of times too many, in the movie.
As Ang Lee's version of the thinking man's Hulk a few years ago quickly proved to be lethal for the box office, Hollywood clearly thought that the green monster is too much of a golden goose to abandon. When a suitable opportunity arises with the Marvel Comic revival, they bring him back, in a one-two punch release led by Iron Man. The rest is history.
This current version of Hulk has "mainstream" and "popular entertainment" written all over it. Handled deftly by the filmmakers, it starts with an efficient and economical establishing sequence of montages that doubles up with the opening credit, giving you the full background (or as much as you need to know anyway) of the story. The real opening sequence starts with Bruce Banner's hideout in Brazil and ends with the US army's special squad trying to take him in. This is as exciting as anything you've seen on screen, culminating in Banner's transformation into Hulk. The rest of the movie, which I'm not going to describe here, is somewhat predictable which doesn't mean to say that it is not entertainingly exciting. Even more predictable is of course the unspoken message: keep an eye open for the sequel.
While not as brilliant as Iron Man, this movie scores well above passing grade in every categorie essential for a box office success, starting with one of the best actors around today  Edward Norton. The rest of the cast goes from good to adequate: (in that order) Tim Roth, William Hurt, Liv Tyler and some others. CGI is good but if you tell yourself that you have not seen better, you either watch very few movies in this genre or are deceiving yourself. Ditto for cinematography. Script (with a good sprinkle of humour), editing and sound all contribute to one single objective  making this a very entertaining comic-adapted action sci-fi thriller.
Is there anything that makes this one stand out? To me, there are two that are worth mentioning. The first is what Ebert describes as the "City of God" neighborhood in the opening sequences, the real thing, not CGI generated, as he intimated in his review. The movie makers have spared no pain in capturing this stunning (in more ways than one) Brazilian neighborhood in as many angles as you can imagine, panoramic as well as microscopic, sweeping as well as stationary. This is a scene that I shall remember for a long time.
The other thing is the character Emil Blonsky, a pure fighter in every drop of his blood, lamenting that as his experience accumulates, his body (mid-forties) deteriorates. The substance that makes Hulk what he is becomes Blonsky's salvation. In one way, we can look at the movie as pivoted on three duels between Blonsky and Banner. The first one is no contest, their first encounter in Brazil when Blonsky leads a special squad to round up Banner, only to find him turning into Hulk. But even than, Blonsky shows a fighting spirit that looks like sheer madness. The last duel, albeit the climax, is all CGI. It's the middle one that is absolutely brilliant, because it ingeniously reverses the roles of David and Goliath. Blonsky has been injected by the army with some of the substance, making him stronger, faster, but still essentially a human being in form. In this, essentially still a no-contest duel, I find myself rooting for the "little guy" (literally, by comparison) rather than the hero Hulk who looks a bit like big, bad and bullying. Tim Roth, Quentin Tarantino's favorite (one of them anyway), is excellent as Blonsky and deserves more credit than he seems to be been given in this movie.