Kelly Wand"The Abominable Hulk" review
June 16th 2008 11:32
Hulk smash. Hulk strong. Hulk dumb.
Has it really only been a month since “Iron Man” breathed fresh energy-bolts into the increasingly tedious superhero genre? Much like watching “The Incredible Hulk”’s supposedly slimmed-down, supposedly action-centric series of incomprehensible story beats gradually unfold like a green poop, it definitely feels longer.
Working with a script by Zak Penn that the Hulk himself could have outwritten, Louis Leterrier’s follow-up to Ang Lee’s infinitely more interesting 2003 flop gives the public what it really wants: two olive-green monstrosities throwing cars at each other. Oh, and the Hulk fights the Army. Again.
This time out, Ed Norton plays the long-suffering Bruce Banner as a fairly bland aspiring martial artist. After enjoying Robert Downey, Jr.’s antics last month, maybe I was expecting too much from Norton. Maybe it’s that the script gives him nothing to do except periodically turn into the CGI Hulk. Maybe it’s that although he spends the (incredible) bulk of the movie insisting he wants to shed himself of the Hulk, he doesn’t seem very intense about it, especially for the usually reliably intense Norton. Unlike Bill Bixby and Eric Bana, Norton never seems to actually get angry. Maybe Norton’s real-life fights with dumbass studio flunkies affected his performance; it’s hard to tell since many of his scenes feel pared down to their most boring constituents. He’s never given long enough to work up a sweat, and still the movie drags. It’s stitched together from the stitching of other superhero movies. Even the Hulk himself looks wrong; he looks gym-sculpted and steroidal rather than massive.
The movie just throws stuff at you randomly without any follow-through; you sense that the filmmakers fear getting into anything interesting that might add to the running time. The movie’s whole story arc is about a “cure” that’s abandoned as a plot device within seconds of its predictable resolution. At one point Stan Lee drinks a Brazilian soda that’s been spiked with Banner’s blood and you can’t tell if he dies or turns into the Hulk or what. In a ham-fisted hodgepodge opening credit sequence designed to tell you that nothing you saw in the first movie actually happened, Ed Norton’s Hulk puts googly-eyed soulmate Liv Tyler into the hospital with disfiguring injuries, although throughout the movie he goes out of his way to protect her (she survives certain incineration twice, once thanks to the Hulk’s magical applause). At another point, Banner eats a strip of metal “data” the size of a tongue depressor, since the Hulk’s digestive system is a way safer stash than his pocket or the nearby library stacks for later retrieval (he can also cough it up at will without untoward medical consequences later on). Oh, and there's an elderly pizzeria owner who's friends with Bruce and Betty but doesn't do anything. And a middle-aged guy that William Hurt's General Ross hired to date his daughter who also doesn't do anything. Oh, and a scene at the Hulk's "cave" stolen openly from "King Kong".
Ross also hires Tim Roth as a mercenary to track the Hulk. Curiously, Roth's character has never heard of the Hulk before, even though at another juncture we’re told the Hulk killed some highway patrolmen or mounties or something. Wait, how did that go down? Shrug. The Army repeatedly engages Banner at a leisurely pace, allowing him to turn into the Hulk, instead of just taking Banner down quickly and knocking him out. They shoot millions of bullets at him, even though bullets have no effect. They have slightly better luck with jeep-mounted sonic cannons but dumbly use only two instead of twelve and leave them within car-hurling range. Ross’ Army doesn’t seem to believe in an endgame; the mindless Hulk outwits them at every turn.
Then there’s Liv Tyler's Betty, whose defining characteristic is what again? Oh yeah, brunette-ness. In one of those somber, philosophical moments (wait, weren't we losing those this time out?) towards the end, just as the Hulk’s about to apply the finishing blow to the Abomination, Liv sobs, “No!” To, you know, prevent the Hulk from killing this indestructible psychopath who’s just killed hundreds of people and can regenerate instantly and is still twitching. Apparently killing (or even rendering unconscious) indestructible psychopathic monstrosities would make the Hulk too unheroic, as opposed to all the dead supervillains in every other Marvel movie to date, most of whom were more human. This is Marvel’s way of improving on Ang Lee’s poodles: depriving us of seeing the Hulk finish off his archenemy. What does the military wind up doing with the Abomination after all that? Shrug.
Finally, what’s up with using the Hulk as a spokesman for abstinence? In one scene Banner starts to get it on with Betty, but has to stop because his pulse is skyrocketing and he “can’t get too excited.” Um, entire concept alert: sexual arousal never caused Hulk-ness before; it was anger. Fury is the Hulk’s whole raison d’etre, not horniness. If anything, having sex should help Banner relax and keep the Hulk at bay, but try explaining Cellular Biology 101 to the ball-less marketing chimps who program summer entertainment. (Later, right after he’s been “cured,” Banner calmly turns into the Hulk simply by stepping out of an airplane. Another scientific first!)
Considering this movie was made as an apology to fanboys for Ang Lee’s child-abuse parable, the final product is surprisingly stingy with Easter eggs. There's nothing after the end credits and a last scene that’s lifted pretty much line for line from the end of “Iron Man”, only this time with Iron Man instead of Samuel Jackson. A psychiatry scene showcased in the trailers involving green-haired brawler Doc Samson from the comics is gone. And the last shot of Ed Norton smiling weirdly and his eyes turning green while doing tai chi is as incomprehensible as the rest of the plot. You leave the theatre with absolutely no idea what the relationships between Banner, Betty, and General Ross are at the end.
There is one good bit about midway through where Betty asks Banner to describe what being the Hulk is like. He compares it to an acid trip. Though he insists he recalls only fragments of his Hulk phases, she speculates that since he remembers anything at all, maybe he has the power to assume command if he just focuses. He dismisses this intriguing notion flatly: “I don’t want to control it. I want to get rid of it.”
He could, easily: by going somewhere truly remote and uninhabited and living a simple life. But what kind of example would that set?
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