Hulk merely pawn in game of life

Rating: 3/10 (15 June 2008)

The Incredible Hulk marks the second transition to the big screen in the span of a month for two of Marvel Comics' stable of superheroes. Hot on the heels of the critically lauded and box office bonanza that was Iron Man, The Hulk tries to catch lightning in a bottle twice in a row, without success.
Sure it's racking up impressive numbers at Rotten Tomatoes, but that's largely due to the gargantuan action sequences that dot this otherwise brain dead movie.
In a clear example of a talented actor in it for nothing more than the paycheck (and let's not forgot those enticing royalty residuals) Edward Norton pretty much walks through his role as Bruce Banner, the scientist/victim of an experiment with gamma radiation gone awry who finds himself morphing into the giant green monster every time his blood pressure escalates or he feels pain.
The plain fact of the matter is that the movie suffers from an overabundance of lousy CGI. I want to cut French director Louis Leterrier (Transporter 2, Danny the Dog) some slack here, after all without resorting to CGI the only way to bring the Hulk to the screen would be to spray tan Lou Ferrigno green once again and slap him in a silly wig (Ferrigno makes a cameo as a pizza-loving security guard in one of the movie's better moments). However, whereas Iron Man's effects were impressive, The Hulk's look chintzy, almost cartoonish. You can never overlook the fact that what you're watching is computer generated.
And while I'm playing the comparison game, whereas Iron Man, through both a smart script and the deft utilization of Robert Downey Jr.'s acting talents, created characters and a story with depth, the Hulk never manages to create a similarly engrossing universe. Even Tim Roth, who does his best to chew up the scenery (both literally and figuratively) as Emil Blonsky, the SAS agent-turned-Abomination, ends up serving as little more than a placeholder for yet more crappy CGI.
Am I being too hard on the green giant? Maybe, but when it comes to muscle-bound cinematic simpletons, I can't help think of Mongo from Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles when he uttered that hysterically philosophical line "Mongo merely pawn in game of life." Yes Mongo, you are, and so is The Hulk, whose creators only aim is to milk theater goers of their ticket cash and deliver second-rate CGI filled crap in return.