The Hulk

Rating

Director

Ang Lee

Screenplay

John Turman, Michael France, James Schamus (Comic: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby)

Length

138 min.

Starring

Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas, Nick Nolte

MPAA Rating

PG-13 (For sci-fi action violence, some disturbing images and brief partial nudity)

Review

Comic book strong man The Hulk arrives on the big screen twenty-five years after the television series starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno hit the airwaves.

In the original TV show, Bixby played the mild-mannered Bruce Branner, here played by Eric Bana. Meanwhile, muscled actor Lou Ferrigno played the eponymous Incredible Hulk. With modern visual effects advancements, producers decided it was time to update the monster and make him larger than life. The problem is their attempt has failed.

We see The Hulk from day one, beginning in childhood. His father (played by Nick Nolte as the elder version and Paul Kersey as the younger version) used young Bruce as a test subject for an immune system building drug that rendered Bruce immune to most viral and bacterial infections. The tests also left Bruce vulnerable to Gamma radiation which, as an adult, caused Bruce to grow in strength when he is angered.

This causes a shakeup as his girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) continues to love the big lug while her father (Sam Elliott), who shut down the Hulk’s fathers experiments in the first place, attempts to track him down and isolate him, possibly killing him in the future. Added into the mix, Nolte’s father figure wants to use his son’s regenerative capabilities on himself and attempts to capture the Hulk himself. To make matters even worse, an unscrupulous Government contractor named Talbot (Josh Lucas) has been attempting to overtake Ross and Banner’s costly science lab in order to further his own career. It puts him into a position of great envy when Betty won’t give him the time of day and Bruce hates his guts.

Bana does his best to uphold the friendly Bruce that his predecessor Bixby had epitomized. The problem is the script he’s working in doesn’t give him the range of emotion that most actors need to survive. Connelly, likewise, has a script that portrays her in an identical light to her undeservedly Oscar winning role in A Beautiful Mind. There and here, she plays the girlfriend of a mentally unbalanced man who ends up in more trouble than he can possibly handle. Connelly gives the exact same performance as the previous, furthering the thought that she only has two ranges. Good (as in Requiem for a Dream ) and bad (everything else).

Nolte is as revolting as ever with a performance that’s as bombastic as we’ve ever seen from him and even more psychotic than usual. One of the film’s later scenes gave us a screaming Nolte with a tirade about freedom and justice, but having heard the speech so many times before, we find ourselves ignoring the intent behind the message and lamenting our ticket purchase. Disappointingly, Elliott gives a likewise exaggerated performance. During most of his scenes, he’s yelling and carrying on with the rest of the cast while forgetting his place. Sure each of the performances is a two-dimensional caricature but unlike the similarly themed Dick Tracy , The Hulk forgets its place of giving juicy and diverse roles to its stars and instead gives its visual effects the front seat.

The visual effects pale in comparison to other effects films this year. Its effects are weak compared to the likes of The Matrix Reloaded and feeble by comparison to big budget effects films of past generations, going back as far as the early ’80s before finding something comparably bad. Taking a pet peeve and turning it into a reality, The Hulk creators obviously thought it would be best to make the lead character a complete CGI-rendering. This has worked for movies like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as well as The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. But here the character is in the lead role where as the aforementioned characters, Dobby the house elf and Gollum, were supporting characters. Needless to say, both Dobby and Gollum were done much better than this brooding, ineffectual Hulk.

The comic book is an art form by itself. Taking penciled drawings, adding ink and color to form a mesmerizing tale that continues from issue to issue, month to month as you wait for the thrilling conclusion that may or may not ever come. With The Hulk , a movie based on the comic book about the same characters, we find a boring story that wraps its plot in one film’s span without any of the fun, serial-style adventure we’ve come to adore from our comic book films.

Director Ang Lee, whose work on the amazing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has been hailed as landmark, has fallen from that lofty perch with an uncharacteristically bad movie. Despite being a terrible movie, Lee does his best to make the film more artistic. Using inset pictures like comic books, he created an environment that felt very artificial. While artfully done, the overabundance of insets unnecessarily jerks the audience out of the movie’s story and prevents the audience from ever attaching itself to the characters.

The Hulk is an embarrassing wreck of a motion picture. With lackluster performances, a horrendous screenplay and obvious visual effects, audiences will likely call this the worst Marvel comic adaptation in history. And they’ll be right in that judgment.

Review Written

July 3, 2003