Reviews: The Awfully Familiar Hulk

Today's review covers yet another geeky movie seen this summer. This one is round two of the season's three big superhero movies. Yes, there was Hellboy 2, but I didn't see the original, so it doesn't count. Hulk 2 is this week's sample, and while it doesn't come close to the level of success of Iron Man, the first and best of the super hero movies so far this summer, it at least entertained.

I call it Hulk 2, but technically it's called The Incredible Hulk, on the semi-mistaken impression that the first Hulk movie sucked. It still is a sequel in any sense of the word, taking the original movie's story and working directly from there, but conveniently avoiding any reference to Bruce Banner's father, the nemesis in the first movie. In this movie, for at least 3/4 of the total runtime, the main villain is the U.S. Army collectively, let by "Thunderbolt" Ross, Bruce's love interest's jerk of a father. He was more blustering and trigger-happy than malevolent in the first movie, but here he's more than happy to capture and dissect the protagonist as part of a really poorly-thought plan to make super-soldiers. Because nothing makes a better weapon than a crazed, enraged, uncontrollable invincible guy who doesn't even seem interested in fighting until somebody shoots him first.

But anyway, the movie had some serious plot issues, most of which I'll save for a post-spoiler section below, but otherwise it worked okay. Now, I didn't hate the Ang Lee movie at all, but I can see how some of its more esoteric elements were annoying to others, and all of them have been purged. Gone are the comic-paneling scenes and the psychotic villain with rapidly fluctuating motivation. And gone are the Hulk-poodles. In its place are a lot more scenes of the Hulk breaking things and Bruce running from guys trying to shoot him and avoiding becoming the Hulk, with refreshing amount of failure. Eventually, his own plans, which revolve around finding a cure but tend to find the most complex and circular ways of doing, nearly come to fruition, just in time for him to fight the movie's actual villain, The Abomination, who's basically an evil Hulk. That makes for an interesting conclusion, but it's a tough one to pull off in practice. The difficulty is inherent in having two enemies with equal powers fighting each other; what makes the hero win without it looking like a cop-out? And there are the problems when the powers are basically super-strength and invincibility, since neither are especially subtle powers, and that the hero in this case is not exactly a tactical genius.

But the interesting thing about the Hulk is that it's not mainly about the villains. Hell, when you get right down to it, the only heroes with a really exceptional rogues' gallery are Batman and Spiderman, though on the plus side that means that other superhero movies feel less obligated to kill the villains at the end of every movie. The Hulk's more about the internal struggle. It's about a superhero who barely counts as a hero at all except when in the direct vicinity of a sufficiently evil villain and created by a guy who hates his very existence in his "superhero" form. This makes the struggle internalized, which might be why it's been harder to make successful movies about him. This one revels in this struggle, both through the exposition and visually, and the isolation of the hero is one of the movie's strengths. That, plus some excellent actions scenes (I loved the initial Brazil chase even before the Hulk shows up,) bumps this movie to a B.

There were some obvious problems, though, which I'll address after a spoiler bump.





Good enough. Okay, first of all, the movie goes into detail about how careful Bruce is and how he avoids detection almost perfectly. Why, then, would he send an email directly to the cellular scientist he was working with even after his computer was captured by the military? Even if he failed to assume they would tag his and the scientist's aliases, why even bother sending an email? Why not just show up, since the email didn't seem to help prepare the guy for the meeting at all? It seemed like a very contrived way to set up the finale. Secondly, the government already has a super-serum that lets its soldiers become regenerative, super-agile, and tireless warriors with only slight aggression being a side-effect. Why not just use that and not the formula that makes you crazy? On the other hand, I liked both the setup that ensured said genetic scientist will be the obvious villain for potential Hulk 3 and that the series overtly links to the earlier Iron Man and the implications of a full-on Avengers movie in the near future.