The Incred­i­ble Hulk

It’s about time we weighed in on The Incred­i­ble Hulk. The summer’s sec­ond release from Mar­vel Stu­dios picks up kin­da where Ang Lee’s left off – Bruce Ban­ner is liv­ing with his gam­ma radi­a­tion, try­ing his best to con­tain the mon­ster with­in him.

The film has tak­en a bit of a kick­ing already in the press with plen­ty of one-star reviews and Ed Nor­ton refus­ing to do pub­lic­i­ty because he’s in a strop about the cre­ative direc­tion that the fran­chise has taken.

To be hon­est, at this point in his career, Nor­ton is the last per­son who ought to be crit­i­cis­ing anybody’s cre­ative direc­tion after a) The Paint­ed Veil, and b) he took the freak­ing part of an all-CGI 10-ton com­ic book char­ac­ter in the first place. Dude, what did you expect?

Well, here’s what we didn’t expect: despite Norton’s hissy fit, The Incred­i­ble Hulk real­ly isn’t that bad, and we say that as a mag­a­zine that could count the num­ber of good com­ic book films on one hand. After we’d put it through a wood chipper.

But it’s an ambigu­ous beast. From an open­ing shot that pans up the ver­tig­i­nous slopes of a Brazil­ian favela, direc­tor Louis Leter­ri­er is at pains to ground this most out­landish of fan­tasies in some sense of real­i­ty. The key to the film is that for all its lat­er erup­tions of dig­i­tal fren­zy, it has worked hard to make you believe in the inner life of this world.

Nor­ton is actu­al­ly very good as Ban­ner; his plain­spo­ken into­na­tion per­fect­ly suit­ing the idea of the doc­tor as an every­man – suf­fer­ing and think­ing rather than emot­ing and ​‘act­ing’. He has a haunt­ed, hunt­ed qual­i­ty that evokes some­thing of Har­ri­son Ford’s Fugi­tive, reveal­ing the first half of Hulk to be less an action extrav­a­gan­za than a psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly tight chase movie.

Of course, Let­terier has upped the ante when it comes to the visu­al effects, with hit and miss results. Sat­is­fy­ing­ly con­cus­sive sound design and more than com­pe­tent CGI make these scenes bona fide eye pop­pers, but here we are again, watch­ing com­put­er char­ac­ters knock sev­en shades of shit out of each oth­er while being asked to ignore such tricky, per­nick­ety issues as ​‘col­lat­er­al dam­age’. But hey: that’s the Amer­i­can way. If they’re not count­ing the bod­ies of the vic­tims in Iraq and Afghanistan, why should Hol­ly­wood be any different?

There’s a brief hia­tus for the ​‘love’ bit, in which Liv Tyler is pre­dictably wast­ed. Like­wise, both Tim Roth and William Hurt are scarce­ly pushed. The most mem­o­rable aspect of Roth’s char­ac­ter is that he’s a British ser­vice­man wear­ing an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary uni­form. What’s that all about? Traitor.

But with some effort at sketch­ing an emo­tion­al land­scape, a res­o­nant lead per­for­mance and effec­tive, um, effects, Hulk is the kind of enjoy­able good time that sum­mer is sup­posed to serve up. Graze the sur­face and you’re unlike­ly to find much of any­thing under­neath (indeed, that gor­geous open­ing shot of the fave­las is real­ly there as a back­drop for gun-tot­ing white dudes to have fun in), but it’s not active­ly as offen­sive as, say, Iron Man, or self-indul­gent­ly bor­ing as Spi­der-Man 3.

Does it give us hope that Mar­vel Stu­dios is on to a good thing? Not real­ly. They’ll keep churn­ing films out to a com­mit­ted fan base who’ll think this is a gold­en age of the event movie, but there’s noth­ing in Hulk that won’t look tired on a sec­ond view­ing, nev­er mind in a few years time. We’re reach­ing, per­haps, the zenith of dis­pos­able junk cul­ture, where Hulk the film is like Hulk the char­ac­ter: big, dumb, impos­si­ble to ignore. The future is green.