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THE INCREDIBLE HULK -Erich's HULKTACULAR SPOILER SMASH REVIEW! Hot

Movie Reviews

Release Date: June 13, 2008
Studio: Universal Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Genre: Adventure • Scifi
Director: Louis Leterrier
Writers: Edward Norton, Zak Penn
Cast: Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, William Hurt, Tim Roth, Tim Blake Nelson, The Hulk
Synopsis: Dr. Bruce Banner, who becomes the monstrous Incredible Hulk if his heart rate goes above a certain level, resurfaces in Brazil after an absence of many years.
Forced to go on the run again, Banner searches for his former girlfriend Betty Ross, a cure for his radiation poisoning and an end to THE INCREDIBLE HULK.
The Review: Beginning with Bruce Banner's mutated memories, THE INCREDIBLE HULK opens with a greatly encapsulated version of the origin of The Hulk, showing Banner's experiments with Gamma Radiation going seriously wrong, seriously wounding girlfriend lab babe Dr.Betty Ross and perhaps killing a few innocent bystanders in the process.

If any of this seems familiar, it's not just because in 2003, director Ang Lee unleashed THE HULK into movie theaters, an overly serious take on the monster from Marvel Comics, it's also because new director Louis Leterrier (TRANSPORTERs 1&2) has framed these early scenes to be very reminiscent of the pilot and the opening credits to the 1977 CBS television show.

The film opens in a Brazillian hillside shanty town where fugitive scientist, and part-time Hulk, Bruce Banner (the perfectly-cast and the film’s co-writer Ed Norton) is holed-up in his dinky hole-in-the-wall apartment.

He's flipping channels on ancient TV, pausing for a moment on the 1969 dramedy "The Courtship of Eddie's Father", allowing for a brief cameo of the late, great "Incredible Hulk" star Bill Bixby

Dr.Banner's got a crap job, working at the local guarana soda bottling plant.His exact job title is never disclosed but his job seems to involve fixing electrical shorts, getting roughed up by the plant's local goon squad and getting the overly long looks from co-worker Martina (Débora Nascimento). I'm going to mention that name again: Débora Nascimento.

Anyway, back to the plot, on the top level of the assembly line, Bruce nicks his hand. The camera follows the drops of blood as they liquidly tumble through the plant's multiple levels of the plant. Banner gets the assembly line stopped and despeartely searches for his hemoglobin.

Unfortunately he completely misses the bad blood-splashed bottle, which then goes about its business, getting filled with the sickly yellow soda, gets labeled and shipped off to the good old US of A.
(Quick side note here-Banner doesn't bother with Band-Aids for his cut- he super-glues his gash shut-now that's badass!)Now, why anyone would want to drink something that looks like something out of an Andres Serrano photograph is beyond me, but now the bottle's in the refrigerator of Hulk co-creator and comics legend Stan Lee (I should hope not playing himself)-NOOO! DON'T DRINK IT STAN!

But it's too late and his single swig causes him to drop the bottle in dramatic slow motion and we know he's a goner.

Moving quickly to The Pentagon, General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (Wiliam Hurt, taking over for Sam Elliot) is informed that a death has been attributed to Gamma radiation poisioning. Here,the hammy William Hurt gnaws away at anything on the set that's not nailed down. Ross puts it all together and sends a crack team to invade the bottling plant and to snatch and grab Banner with great predjudice. Here we meet,lucky for Hurt, Tim "Pumpkin" Roth, as Emil Blonksky-he's part of the top black-ops team that goes after Banner in his favela slum and Roth and Hurt belly up to the scenery salad bar with great gusto from here on out.

Meanwhile, Bruce has been keeping busy. He's taking yoga and breathing classes to control reducing his heart rate . And, even though he lives in the slummiest of slums and probably makes a sub-sub-sub-sub minimum wage, he's managed to set up a micro lab, including a satellite laptop, a high-powered microscope and one of those things that spins test tubes around really fast.

Bruce is using the laptop to surf porn (just kidding!) (But, if he was checking out the chicas, do you think he'd be looking at http://earthfirst.com's the 25 hottest girls in green?)-and to have an encrypted email conversation with a mysterious "Mr.Blue"- the two of them working together to come up with rainforest-based pharmecutical resolutions to Bruce's radiation issues to no avail.

Ed Norton, who already has built up a dangerous filmic portfolio with films like AMERICAN HISTORY X, and FIGHT CLUB is the anti-Eric Bana Banner. I never liked Eric Bana in Ang Lee's HULK. His Bruce Banner was like Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates,too solid and too movie star for me to appreciate his thick take on the irradiated scientist.

Norton's undeveloped frame,sad sack face and world-weary voice all perfectly evoked for me both the character's intelligence, loneliness and sensitivity.

Bruce escapes the military baddies in a BOURNE-esque rooftop and alleyway chase-for a moment anyway.He ends up in the plant, surrounded by the aforementioned goon squad and there's nowhere to go.

The locals kick his ass and he's thrown into the darkness. The special forces lose sight of their target-but something new else appears on their green night-vision scopes. It's really big, really strong and really really mad.

As the factory fight progresses, we see very little of The Hulkster as the military men are whisked into the darkness and the smoke.

It's very BATMAN BEGINS and very exciting.

Following the battle of the bottling plant , Bruce finds himself wearing nothing but a pair of over-stretched trousers out in the middle of nowhere-actually in the countryside of neighboring country Paraguay, some 80 kilometers away.

Here we really get to see Banner as truly a tragic figure, a man without a country,a man without shoes, a pathetic nomad of a man ,and it's also at this point where Craig Armstrong's strong score throws in the sad theme main theme from "The Hulk" tv show.

It's also around here that I have one of my small quibbles with the film, as Bruce is shown in Paraguay and a scant seven days later has made it to the east coast of the USA .

I just think it would take longer for a man of such limited means to make such a distance- but what do I know?

Blonsky's pissed-offsky when he and his team lose Banner in Brazil and Ross gives him the opportunity to even the odds-to become a "super soldier" if you will.

Banner makes his way the unnamed East coast college (unamed because I can't remember what it's called-sorry) where he and Betty Ross (the general's daughter) and a whole bunch of radiation previously created the post-modern Prometheus Hulk.

The lovely Liv Tyler ably takes over the role of Betty Ross from THE HULK's equally lovely Jennifer Connolly. (Not to take anything from Jennifer's portrayal, but when Miss Connolly portrayed Miss Ross, I always got these weird A BEAUTIFUL MIND flashbacks and I kept wondering where the hell Russell Crowe was).

Bruce secures lodging upstairs at Stanley's (Stan Lee-gettit?)Pizza Place and after a little bit of good-natured stalking, ascertains that his Betty has moved on.

Bruce breaks into the campus computer lab after bribing the security guard (TV Hulk Lou Ferrigno-whose appearance brought scattered applause) and later is reunited with Betty.

Dr. Samson-(Ty Burrell)-the new guy in Betty's life, is given the shortest shrift of all the new and returning characters in the movie.

With one memorable line of dialog and very little else , it's obvious even from watching the commercials for HULK that his part was pared down to the bone. I didn't miss him at all, based on a remarkably wimpy performance( I felt compelled to kick in his teeth for no real good reason).

Unfortunately,the less we see of his character, the less sympathetic Betty becomes. Now she's shown to be with this guy (for an undisclosed amount of time), but the moment Bruce shows up, he's dropped faster than the sequel clause in Ang Lee's contract.

Betty and Bruce make a really cute couple and they have a very sweet chemistry together-check out the scene where she untucks his shirt and takes off the baseball cap he has jammed down on his head-nevertheless,Samson is left in the narrative lurch and the film suffers (but not very much, don't worry)for it.

Betty and Bruce's attempts to get him un-hulked are put to waste when again, THE US ARMY led by Bill Hurt, goes after BRUCE who rapidly becomes THE HULK and there’s a HUGE on campus action scene which makes the KENT STATE shootings of 1970 look a game of Lawn Bowling by comparison.

The local news coverage of the conflict gets eyewitness accounts from two college dweebs identified as JACK MGHEE-an obvious respelling of INTREPID INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER Jack McGee from the “The Incredible Hulk” TV show, and KEVIN FEIGE, who shares his name with THE HULK 2’s executive producer.

With the Hulk dodging bullets, smashing Humvees and facing off against a pair of sonic driving blast cannons(?!)-and using gigantic pieces of a university lawn sculpture to do it, we really get to see the not-so-jolly green giant in action.

So, how does he look?

Surprise surprise,our Hulk looks pretty damn good and the special effects, although not incredibly special (wait for the scene in the rain below),look much better than I had previously presumed.

Leterrier's Hulk bears little resemblance to (Ang)Lee's Hulk and I'm perfectly happy with that.The Hulk has had countless artists over the years, from co-creator's Jack "The King" Kirby's grey variation on Dr.Frankenstein's monster to the uber-ripped behemoth drawn by David Finch and all, in my humble opinion, have equal weight-if not equal mass (even though my wife Sarah keeps telling me "He's still too big!"
I was very happy with the ending to the campus action set piece, since Blonsky gets Hulk-kicked into a tree.

Following a gently sweet, rain-soaked scene between the monstrous Hulk and the recently rescued Ross, Bruce and Betty go on the lam from the Army together.
Without spoiling anything, I can happily report that PURPLE STRETCHY PANTS have a non-speaking cameo at this part of the film.

There’s quite a bit more plot to go and a fun performance by Tim Blake Nelson as the mysterious “Mr.Blue”

By this time, Emil Blonsky has been shot with more additives than a box of Twinkies and has additionally been zapped by even more Gamma radiation than Bruce Banner had ever been on the receiving end of, and he has mutated into THE ABOMINATION.

It’s time for the the film's climactic battle between the fully realized and fully disgusting Abomination and the our heroic Hulk.

This is an awesome slug-fest on the streets of Harlem as Craig Armstrong’s score kicks into thumpy overdrive.
Unfortunately I've never been to Harlem and I know the scenes were filmed in Toronto, Ontario Canada ( Hi Suzanne Pinto!) , but I would hope the filmakers made some attempt to create a realistic cityscape. This is an epic battle which includes The Hulk smashing a police car in half and then walloping the big A with both sides of the squad car.

Unlike the climatic moonlit donnybrook of the first Hulk film (where I would swear that nobody involved with that mess of a scene had the slightest notion what the hell was going on), the big battle here is well-lit, well-choreographed, thrilling and I know all of you Marvel fanboys and fangirls will lap up the ultra-violence like it's a five-dollar Shamrock Shake(tm) from Jack Rabbit Slim's.

And speaking of Marvel Comics, comic book fans (and fans of the recent IRON MAN movie) should stay in their seats until the end credits Stark, I mean start, up.

Y’all be happy you did.

If you liked THE HULK, you’ll love THE HULKA-HULKA-HULKA INCREDIBLE HULK!

PS.Looking for Hulk gifts for Father's Day?
Run to Amazon.com and pick up the awesome hardcover KIRBY:KING OF COMICS by Mark Evanier- a $40.00 value for only $24.00!

Amazon also has a 2-CD version of Craig Armstrong's THE INCREDIBLE HULK score(which includes music for scenes cut out of the finished film like Track 1:The Arctic)for $16.99.

If you need the perfect budget HULK item, I'm going to highly recommend the Bruce Banner action figure available at fine Toy stores everywhere.

I'm not going to suggest getting a 12" scale Hulk toy because they haven't released one from the movie yet.
Note to Hasbro:Get off your toy-making butts and make one!
Rating: 4 out of 5

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