The Incredible Hulk
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” - Tom Clancy
It’s not really fair of me to compare this year’s The Incredible Hulk to Ang Lee’s 2003 film which was simply titled Hulk. It’s not fair, but I nevertheless found myself comparing them throughout the new film.
It’s only fair to point out that I’m one of the seven people not directly involved with making the film that actually liked the 2003 version. I found the rather lyrical visual style engaging, I enjoyed finally watching a comic book movie that looked like a comic book. Maybe that was why I was able to more readily accept that films rather cartoony looking Hulk more than I was able to accept this new one, which just didn’t look natural . . . or at least he didn’t look as natural as a nine foot tall green monster can.
Edward Norton is a fine actor, and given his performances in Fight Club, Primal Fear, and American History X the role of Bruce Banner would seem to have been tailor-made for him. But as Banner, Norton fizzles. How can a man who has mastered the art of dramatic duality fall so flat in this, the best distillation of that concept since The Strange Case of Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde? How indeed? Nevertheless, fall flat he does, or at the very least, his considerable talent was squandered by an inattentive production and writing team.
This is not to say that the film was bad; it had great effects, paid plenty of homage to the source material, while still retaining its own identity, and unlike Lee’s film, the phrase “Hulk SMASH!” did indeed find its way into the dialog.
If the movie was missing something then, it was missing believability. Not in the basic science (which is Happy Meal science, anyway) behind the premise of the series, but in the characters. I had a hard time believing in Liv Tyler as a scientist (and I still think that Jennifer Connelly made a way cuter Betty Ross, by the by). I had a hard time believing anybody, even a career special ops soldier like Blonsky (Tim Roth), would want to do to themselves what they saw in Banner. (And, yes, I know people do things just as crazy in real life, but the film didn’t give me any good reason to believe that Blonsky would.) And I had a hard time believing that the Hulk was really very incredible.
The Hulk is supposed to be an enormous three-year-old boy throwing a temper tantrum. This one just seemed kind of annoyed. In the end, so was I.