Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
The Incredible Hulk (2008)–**1/2
It’s easier to stand in awe of The Incredible Hulk as part of Marvel Studios’ greater plan than it is to enjoy it as a movie all its own. The blockbuster retooling of the Hulk, a comic book hero we last saw on screen only five years ago, gives fans the action many demanded after Ang Lee’s flawed, but ultimately more interesting superhero psychodrama. Unfortunately, The Incredible Hulk is equally flawed, tragically overlooking the anguish of Bruce Banner in an effort to make a more consumable picture.
This film, which serves as a quasi-sequel to 2003’s Hulk, finds Banner (Edward Norton) in Rio de Janeiro. He’s off the radar, working as a day laborer and learning to control his anger. As we learn from a rather cumbersome opening credits sequence, he’s still been blasted with Gamma radiation in a botched military experiment, which turns him in to a rampaging green monster when he gets too excited.
You get a sense of the film’s, no, the character’s biggest problem after Banner is discovered by the military’s General Ross (William Hurt). Ross sends in a special forces unit lead by Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) to extract Banner from his Rio hide out, and we see just how prone to excess every aspect of the film is. The action is bigger as Banner transforms into Hulk and thrashes his would-be captors. Hurt, channeling a bit of his A History of Violence character, is more sinister than the Ross we saw in the previous Hulk film. And Banner, in the hands of Norton, is more bland than ever.
Banner escapes, of course, and works his way back to America. There he enlists the help of Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), General Ross’ scientist daughter and Banner’s former lover, to get him in contact with a New York City-based researcher who can help him kill that which lurks inside. Norton’s lack of expressiveness kills any effort to produce a decent character out of Banner, which makes Roth’s Blonsky the film’s most engaging character.
Driven to capture Banner at all costs, Ross injects Blonsky with a super soldier serum (for non-Marvel fans, that’s the stuff that made Captain America). Blonsky’s new powers make him obsessed with becoming more powerful than the Hulk. The result is Abomination, a nemesis worthy of dueling with Hulk in NYC.
With numerous references to filmed and yet-to-be filmed Marvel heroes, mostly in scenes with Blonsky and Ross, The Incredible Hulk works on a level that has little to do with the film we are watching. (Watch out for the Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark scene.) In a post-Iron Man world, we can appreciate the greater value of establishing Hulk as a force not to be trifled with and get excited about upcoming films in this new Marvel cinema universe. The next time we see Hulk on screen, be it as part of a team of superheroes like the Avengers or in another stand alone film, all I ask is that the director, unlike Louis Leterrier, appreciate the psychology of the character.
Oh, and recast Banner.
The Incredible Hulk, directed by Louis Leterrier, starring Edward Norton, William Hurt, Liv Tyler and Tim Roth, is in theaters now.
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