|
Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk
by Bill Wine
Scientist Bruce Banner seeks a cure for a condition that turns him into an enormous green monster when he's under emotional stress — and he has plenty of stress — as he's on the run and battling a new creature, The Abomination.
RATING: PG-13
GENRE: Action fantasy
RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2008
RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes
VIOLENCE FACTOR: There are several sequences of intense but cartoonish action violence.
BAD WORDS: There are a few briefly suggestive references.
RACY? One scene includes an oblique but good-humored discussion of sexuality.
GRANDS:
CRITIQUE:
Riddle: What's big and green and being filmed all over again? Answer: The Incredible Hulk.
Well, we can see that it's big and he's green. But by the time the credits roll, we wonder why in the world this movie was produced. And so soon after the last one.
The Incredible Hulk is a sort of sequel and a sort of remake. It's another take on the Marvel Comic Books character who first emerged on the page in the early 1960s, in a TV series in the late 1970s, and then as a movie icon in 2003, directed by Oscar-winner Ang Lee in a foray outside his art-film comfort zone .
Audiences balked, especially at the computer-generated effects, claiming that the gigantic green monster who emerges whenever Banner, previously exposed to gamma radiation, gets angry, looked like Gumby.
So now The Incredible Hulk follows Hulk by only five years, certainly an unusual occurrence for a virtual reboot.
Edward Norton, who plays the Hulk, goes uncredited as a coproducer and yet uses the pseudonym of Edward Harrison as a co-scriptwriter. Artists, go figure. Norton replaces Eric Bana as Bruce Banner, with Liv Tyler taking over for Jennifer Connelly as Betty, his soulmate. William Hurt plays General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, a military man trying to track down Banner/Hulk. Thunderbolt is in hiding in Brazil, to somehow harness the Hulk's powers and use them to produce super-soldiers. And Tim Roth plays The Abomination, the Hulk's nemesis who also has superpowers, with sights set on a big-picture takeover.
Where the previous film was slow and dark and chatty, with a silent Hulk, The Incredible Hulk is fast and active and visual, and with a Hulk who sometimes speaks.
But the movie makes the same mistake that the first one did: showing us far too much of the obvious special effects and ignoring the beast-within theme in the name of pure, mindless Transformers-like action.
Grandchildren who respond to the character may enjoy the muscular spectacle, but grandparents who saw the first one will wonder why we are once again in the valley of the unjolly — uh oh oh — green giant.
GP Rating System:
Three Grands = Bravo, don't miss it.
Two Grands = Good enough, don't dismiss it.
One Grand = Okay, even if we dis it.
|
