Sometimes even a superhero needs saving. Consider the poor Hulk, one of Marvel Comics's most cherished icons, who was so lamentably served by Ang Lee's Hulk in 2003, a turgid, pretentious and overlong misfire that featured Eric Bana in the utterly forgettable title role.
Five years later, with The Incredible Hulk, an unlikely rescuer has come to the Big Green Guy's aid: a tall, slender, super-serious actor with a receding chin and diffident, restrained temperament.
The difference between the two titles says it all. Edward Norton, known for his hyper-intellectual style and a penchant for rewriting every movie he does (including this one),
has returned the story and character to their basics,delivering a straightforward, relatively uncluttered adaptation of the Stan Lee strip that, while perhaps still a tad stiff and sober, achieves the all-important task of restoring the Hulk's pride of place in Marvel's pantheon of heroic mutants.
The Incredible Hulk may not qualify as a whiz-bang yippee thrill ride, but it gets the job done, with deep sincerity and respect for its source material: It's fun but it's serious fun.
Monster
The Incredible Hulk opens five years after the last film, with the erstwhile scientist Bruce Banner (Norton) on the run in Brazil, eluding the nefarious General Ross (William Hurt), pining for his lost love — Ross's daughter Betty (Liv Tyler) — and working out in an anger-management dojo, the better to control the adrenaline that triggers his transformation into a giant green monster.
Labouring in a soda pop bottling plant and living in acramped hovel in a crowded favela, Banner spends his free time working on a cure for his, um, condition, compulsively
e-mailing a faceless collaborator in the States. Thus do Norton and director Louis Leterrier set up the essential questions that drive The Incredible Hulk: Will Banner escape
his US government pursuers? And will he accept or disown his terrifying power?
That's really about it in a film that, after a half-hour of establishing Banner's mournful, solitary existence, turns into a chase flick that sends him from Brazil to Guatemala to Mexico to Virginia to New York and beyond. (As for the Incredible Hulk back story, all that pesky exposition is handled during the opening credits: Thank heaven for
montages!)
Bruce banner
One of the filmmakers'wisest choices was to take that time upfront to allow viewers to fall back in love with Banner, who (like so many great comic book heroes) is a loner and tortured soul. By the time he hulks out into his barely verbal, absurdly gigantic alter ego (those tattered pants, that “Hulk smash” vernacular), we know the guy inside and care about him.
Norton plays Banner completely straight, infusing him with his usual blend of quiet vulnerability and laserlike intensity. He's enormously appealing, and superbly skilled at exploiting the audience's most protective instincts, even if his character isn't always worthy of them. Few actors play wounded so well.
So with viewers safely on his side, Banner proceeds to take them on a classic comic-book hero quest.
All the actors hit their marks with professionalism and class, including Tim Roth as a Russian-born sharpshooter enlisted by the General to dispatch Banner, and Hurt, who once said he adopts a spirit animal for every role he plays. With his ballistic blue eyes, silvery widow's peak and a moustache capable of picking a fight at 20 paces, he seems to have chosen Mike Ditka.
Human features
And how are the special effects? It's always difficult to judge whether the computer-generated images in these movies are supposed to look seamless or fake when seamlessness itself looks fake.
For example, a scene where the Hulk hides in a cave during a rainstorm looks patently false but it also looks, appropriately enough, like a page that's been ripped out of a comic book.
One of the most arresting CGI sequences features Banner briefly transforming into the Hulk and then back again — which is not only pretty cool but marks another clever way of humanising a creature who, even at his biggest andgreenest, always retains recognisable human features.
In classic monster-movie fashion, Leterrier holds the Hulk back from full view until nearly halfway through the movie, so that he's more a terrifying shadow than the decidedly Un-Jolly Green Giant.
Action Spectacle
If The Incredible Hulk succeeds on its own terms, proving that Banner and his inner bad boy hold their own as bona fide movie material, that final fight scene raises a potentially vexing parallel.
Watching as the Hulk and Abomination go at it in the streets of Harlem, the clanging, grunting, monster-truck brute force often looks like a mere replay of Iron Man's confrontation with Iron Monger in the streets of Los Angeles — with enormous, vaguely amphibian creatures replacing two machines (still, it's an improvement).
The challenge, now that the Marvel franchise stands poised to become an unstoppable force, is how filmmakers can keep upping the action-spectacle ante without simply
resorting to the cinematic steroids of CGI effects and bigger cars to smash together.
The one certainty is that, as The Incredible Hulk's hilarious and tantalising epilogue makes clear, audiences will definitely find out in movies yet to come
The Hulk: mean and green
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