The Incredible Hulk
Directed by Louis Laterrier
Despite peanut-gallery consensus, Ang Lee’s 2002 The Hulk was a respectable failure—in fact, it was Lee’s least enervating cinematic adaptation. Typically overlong, its sincere attempt to produce Pop imagery respected Stan Lee’s original story. Scientist Bruce Banner’s exposure to gamma rays that turn him into a creature of uncontrollable anger made a better comic-book movie—with actors Nick Nolte, Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly making it plausible—than the Marvel Comics audience could appreciate. Now there’s a new film version titled The Incredible Hulk, starring actor-auteur Edward Norton; it’s the crappy summer blockbuster Marvelites probably deserve.
This Bruce Banner has the same soft-voiced, nerdy naturalism Norton brought to Fight Club. Without Bana’s boyish vulnerability, Norton sponsors the modish fantasy of a yuppie’s inner Hercules. The idea is to upgrade The Hulk from comic book teen dream to boomer alter ego. Hiding among Brazil’s Third World poor, Banner studies with a Muy Thai martial arts expert who advises “best way to control your anger is to control your body.” But when hunted by predators representing Pentagon imperialism, Norton’s Banner loses his cool and erupts into a four-story, green-skinned musclehead. He vents the aggression of white-collar guys and anti-military hipsters.
This artsy/B-movie conceit doesn’t work as well for Norton as 2001’s Red Dragon. In Brett Ratner’s Hannibal Lecter remake, Norton unpretentiously surpassed The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Manhunter solely through the quality of its eccentric-actor gravitas (especially Emily Watson and Ralph Fiennes at their best). Each of them brought unexpected, original, deep feeling to market-proven junk. But it’s a large order to try transcending the characterizations Ang Lee got out of Nolte, Bana and Connelly. And Norton (for all his pre–Ryan Gosling sensitivity) can’t. Neither can lovely Liv Tyler as Banner’s steadfast girlfriend Betty or William Hurt as her hawkish military-man father bluffing a Sam Elliott mustache. All their Actors’ Studio earnestness—attempting to make The Incredible Hulk’s audience credulous of its wish-fulfillment F/X—becomes inescapably obvious and drab.
Norton’s conceit that Banner’s transformation into the Hulk represents Gen-X anti-militarism is more pretentious than Ang Lee’s comic book humanism, particularly because it still indulges the trashier Marvel elements: Banner’s green metamorphoses are meant to rouse some subconscious macho instinct every time Banner fights the military-industrial complex. Tim Roth plays the Hulk’s nemesis, an over-eager soldier who voluntarily submits to clinical tests that make him an ogre (“If I could take what I know now and put it in the body I had 10 years ago, that’d be somebody I wouldn’t want to fight.’’)
The result is an Incredible Hulk so violent that it suggests a war movie. (In three big combat scenes, the “Unjolly” Green Giant demolishes a Brazilian soda-bottling plant, a college campus that evokes Kent State and Harlem’s 125th Street.) Yet these sequences distract audiences from the Iraq War moment and the conscientiousness of good movies like Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha and John Cusack’s War, Inc. that addressed current perplexity about war. It uses comic book mania to further dumb-down the pop audience. There’s an ugly sequence where a trifling scientist (Tim Blake Nelson) declares “I hate the government as much as anyone,” then exposes Banner and gives in to Roth’s antagonist (“It’s beautiful! It’s god-like!”). It’s an unscrupulous plot turn. That this quasi-gay scientist admires the Nietzschean villain and dies with a freakish, orgasmic grimace is meaningless—offering none of Spielberg’s action-movie ethics, just shallow liberal, adolescent excitation. In the end, these allegorical characters fail comic book myth. Indefinably good-vs.-evil, they stand for nothing.
Norton probably thought he’d get away with joining the same fake-political franchise as Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr. does a morose cameo as Tony Stark). His only smart idea was hiring director Louis Leterrier. But Leterrier (who did the terrific Transporter II) is hemmed-in by this King Kongification of The Hulk. Action fans who ignored the Èlan of Transporter II and such Luc Besson–influenced films as Unleashed, Crank and Hit Man will be settling for less if they accept The Incredible Hulk’s busyness. There’s a dull Cloverfield urban rampage and a behemoth battle royale no different than the damn polar bears fighting in The Golden Compass. Summer audiences are expected to forget Ang Lee’s attempted enrichment and simply go along with the Marvel inanity.
After The Incredibles, couldn’t we reasonably expect Bruce and Betty to domesticate and become, say, The Flintstones? And the sex scene where Banner warns Betty, “I can’t get too excited.” is lame after The Simpsons’ Paul Bunyan episode where Marge cautioned, “Just let me do a few more yoga lessons.” Instead, The Incredible Hulk is another asexual Marvel adaptation, sublimating eros with pubescent violence. Hulk comic fans should reject it, grow up and become cineastes who appreciate Humphrey Bogart’s masculinity crisis in Nick Ray’s In a Lonely Place. That’s what Ang Lee rightly knew.
Directed by Louis Laterrier
Despite peanut-gallery consensus, Ang Lee’s 2002 The Hulk was a respectable failure—in fact, it was Lee’s least enervating cinematic adaptation. Typically overlong, its sincere attempt to produce Pop imagery respected Stan Lee’s original story. Scientist Bruce Banner’s exposure to gamma rays that turn him into a creature of uncontrollable anger made a better comic-book movie—with actors Nick Nolte, Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly making it plausible—than the Marvel Comics audience could appreciate. Now there’s a new film version titled The Incredible Hulk, starring actor-auteur Edward Norton; it’s the crappy summer blockbuster Marvelites probably deserve.
This Bruce Banner has the same soft-voiced, nerdy naturalism Norton brought to Fight Club. Without Bana’s boyish vulnerability, Norton sponsors the modish fantasy of a yuppie’s inner Hercules. The idea is to upgrade The Hulk from comic book teen dream to boomer alter ego. Hiding among Brazil’s Third World poor, Banner studies with a Muy Thai martial arts expert who advises “best way to control your anger is to control your body.” But when hunted by predators representing Pentagon imperialism, Norton’s Banner loses his cool and erupts into a four-story, green-skinned musclehead. He vents the aggression of white-collar guys and anti-military hipsters.
This artsy/B-movie conceit doesn’t work as well for Norton as 2001’s Red Dragon. In Brett Ratner’s Hannibal Lecter remake, Norton unpretentiously surpassed The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Manhunter solely through the quality of its eccentric-actor gravitas (especially Emily Watson and Ralph Fiennes at their best). Each of them brought unexpected, original, deep feeling to market-proven junk. But it’s a large order to try transcending the characterizations Ang Lee got out of Nolte, Bana and Connelly. And Norton (for all his pre–Ryan Gosling sensitivity) can’t. Neither can lovely Liv Tyler as Banner’s steadfast girlfriend Betty or William Hurt as her hawkish military-man father bluffing a Sam Elliott mustache. All their Actors’ Studio earnestness—attempting to make The Incredible Hulk’s audience credulous of its wish-fulfillment F/X—becomes inescapably obvious and drab.
Norton’s conceit that Banner’s transformation into the Hulk represents Gen-X anti-militarism is more pretentious than Ang Lee’s comic book humanism, particularly because it still indulges the trashier Marvel elements: Banner’s green metamorphoses are meant to rouse some subconscious macho instinct every time Banner fights the military-industrial complex. Tim Roth plays the Hulk’s nemesis, an over-eager soldier who voluntarily submits to clinical tests that make him an ogre (“If I could take what I know now and put it in the body I had 10 years ago, that’d be somebody I wouldn’t want to fight.’’)
The result is an Incredible Hulk so violent that it suggests a war movie. (In three big combat scenes, the “Unjolly” Green Giant demolishes a Brazilian soda-bottling plant, a college campus that evokes Kent State and Harlem’s 125th Street.) Yet these sequences distract audiences from the Iraq War moment and the conscientiousness of good movies like Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha and John Cusack’s War, Inc. that addressed current perplexity about war. It uses comic book mania to further dumb-down the pop audience. There’s an ugly sequence where a trifling scientist (Tim Blake Nelson) declares “I hate the government as much as anyone,” then exposes Banner and gives in to Roth’s antagonist (“It’s beautiful! It’s god-like!”). It’s an unscrupulous plot turn. That this quasi-gay scientist admires the Nietzschean villain and dies with a freakish, orgasmic grimace is meaningless—offering none of Spielberg’s action-movie ethics, just shallow liberal, adolescent excitation. In the end, these allegorical characters fail comic book myth. Indefinably good-vs.-evil, they stand for nothing.
Norton probably thought he’d get away with joining the same fake-political franchise as Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr. does a morose cameo as Tony Stark). His only smart idea was hiring director Louis Leterrier. But Leterrier (who did the terrific Transporter II) is hemmed-in by this King Kongification of The Hulk. Action fans who ignored the Èlan of Transporter II and such Luc Besson–influenced films as Unleashed, Crank and Hit Man will be settling for less if they accept The Incredible Hulk’s busyness. There’s a dull Cloverfield urban rampage and a behemoth battle royale no different than the damn polar bears fighting in The Golden Compass. Summer audiences are expected to forget Ang Lee’s attempted enrichment and simply go along with the Marvel inanity.
After The Incredibles, couldn’t we reasonably expect Bruce and Betty to domesticate and become, say, The Flintstones? And the sex scene where Banner warns Betty, “I can’t get too excited.” is lame after The Simpsons’ Paul Bunyan episode where Marge cautioned, “Just let me do a few more yoga lessons.” Instead, The Incredible Hulk is another asexual Marvel adaptation, sublimating eros with pubescent violence. Hulk comic fans should reject it, grow up and become cineastes who appreciate Humphrey Bogart’s masculinity crisis in Nick Ray’s In a Lonely Place. That’s what Ang Lee rightly knew.
