The Incredible Hulk

I thought it was fit­ting my first review be of The Incred­i­ble Hulk. Indeed, like The Hulk this blog will rise up, green with fury, and smite all bad movies which lie within its path. That, and it was what hap­pened to be next in my Net­flix queue. This iter­a­tion of The Incred­i­ble Hulk is the sec­ond movie this decade to chron­i­cle the adven­tures of the green giant. How­ever, rather than an sequel of the ill received 2003 film, this ver­sion is pro­duced by the comic giant Mar­vel itself and begins a new series of movies star­ring Edward Nor­ton.

I’ve never really man­aged to get into The Incred­i­ble Hulk. Some­thing about a big green guy run­ning around smash­ing things while grunt­ing sin­gle syl­la­ble words just never really appealed to me. Maybe it’s the lack of intel­li­gent super hero/villain ban­ter. I think my biggest com­plaint is with the dis­pro­por­tion­ate size increase. A guy gain­ing large amounts of mus­cle mass and maybe a few inches of height I can buy, but in newer Hulk films the jolly green giant gains any­where from 3 – 8 feet in height. That’s a seri­ous increase in bone struc­ture. After wak­ing up, his pants shouldn’t be the only thing he has to hold up, there should be some major skin sag­gage hap­pen­ing. Instead of Edward Nor­ton, Bruce Ban­ner would have been bet­ter rep­re­sented by Jar­rod the Sub­way Guy. On the other hand, show me a guy who can climb walls and shoot web­bing out of his wrists or a guy who flies about boil­ing cof­fee with his eyes, and I’m pretty much sold.

Enough com­plain­ing though. This film was actu­ally pretty good. Edward Nor­ton did a fine job and he and Liv Tyler work well together on screen. The vil­lains were believ­able and had some char­ac­ter depth. What more could one ask for? Oh yes: car­nage, destruc­tion, and blood­shed. Luck­ily, The Incred­i­ble Hulk does not fail to deliver in this respect. There are actu­ally a num­ber of action sequences fea­tur­ing Edward Nor­ton not as The Hulk run­ning from var­i­ous mil­i­tary per­son­nel, which were eas­ily my favorite of the action scenes. Of course, there were the oblig­a­tory sequences fea­tur­ing the Hulk killing every­thing in sight, which were enjoy­able as well. Until the end that is. Now I know this is The Incred­i­ble Hulk and there­fore was expect­ing all sorts of over the top action, but I became spoiled by the movie’s restraint through the early part of the film, so when the last thirty min­utes arrived and it appeared as though Louis Leter­rier had sud­denly real­ized there was a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money left in the com­puter graph­ics bud­get, I must con­fess I was slightly dis­ap­pointed. But really, that’s not much to com­plain about. If you didn’t know you were walk­ing into a CG extrav­a­ganza, you were prob­a­bly dis­ap­pointed for a lot of other rea­sons as well.

If you’re watch­ing this on DVD, and you must be, since it’s been out of the the­aters for six months, be sure to check out the deleted scenes. There are two types of deleted scenes. The ones that make you won­der why they even both­ered scratch­ing out space for them on the DVD and the ones that make you won­der why they were removed from the film in the first place. Hap­pily, most of the ones on this disc are the lat­ter and should sat­ify your crav­ing – should you have one – for more knowl­edge of the char­ac­ters and plotline.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 1:08 am and is filed under News, Previews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.