Monday, June 29, 2015

Summer of Marvel: The Incredible Hulk (2008)

"HULK SMASH!

By Kit

We're back!

Following up their big-hit Iron Man later that summer Marvel released their attempted reboot of the Hulk. The Hulk had previously been made into a film in 2004 to much disappointment, widely seen as too pretentious and too dreary by many. So in 2008 they decided to add more action and less drama, but still retain some.

Does it work? Let's see.

The Plot

The movie begins with an opening credits montage giving us a little back story on what has happened; Bruce Banner was doing tests for a military project led by General Ross alongside Ross’ daughter, Betty, who he has a thing for. Something goes wrong, he turns into a giant monster, severely injures Betty Ross and is forced to go on the run from General Ross.

The movie then picks up with him in Brazil, working at a factory that bottles a type of green soda (the color green pops up a lot in this movie) and he is well-liked by floor manager who often has him fixing broken-down devices. When he is not working he often works on ways to manage his anger and communicates online with a mysterious Mr. Blue, who might know of a cure.

Unfortunately, a bit of his blood falls into a bottle where it is shipped to America and consumed by Stan Lee, who contracts gamma radiation poisoning/sickness from it, which, after tracking it to the factory it was made, alerts General Ross to Banner’s likely whereabouts. He promptly sends a squad of soldiers led by Russian-born Brit special ops guy Emil Blonsky —neglecting to inform them of Bruce’s unique “condition”.

They go in and try to grab Bruce while a group of local thugs are messing with him. Eventually, both push Bruce far enough that he snaps and you know how that song and dance goes. What follows is a mostly-in-the-dark fight scene (smart decision, I should add) where the Hulk takes out both the local thugs and Blonsky’s soldiers one-by-one. The hulk flees and Bruce soon finds himself waking up in Guatemala (the Hulks runs far) where he decides to head back home to Culver University.

Arriving there he meets up with an old friend who tells him his old girlfriend Betty is dating some guy played by Phil Dunphy from Modern Family. Bruce decides to get into the computer lab and hack in using Betty’s password to get the information on the research back when the experiments went wrong. He does and returns to his old friend’s place —where Betty is there with her boyfriend.They see each other.

Meanwhile Blonsky is filled in by Ross on what Banner was doing, apparently, unbeknownst to him, he was working on trying to re-build the old Super-soldier serum from the 1940s. Things were not going well but he was sure he was onto something so he went ahead with a test and things went wrong or something like that. Blonsky decides he wants a bit of that and Ross agrees.

Meanwhile, Bruce and Betty are catching up at the Quad when the military arrives, having been informed by Betty’s ex-boyfriend. Bruce gets put in a corner and Hulks out and tosses a few humvees like a two-year old tosses little toy cars. That is, until Blonsky arrives who manages to put up a decent fight dodging his blows due to the super-soldier serum until the Hulk eventually knocks him out of the fight, breaking all of his bones. The Hulk then flees with Betty.

After returning to his human form Betty and Bruce decide to travel to New York City to meet up with Mr. Blue, or Samuel Sterns, a.k.a., “The Leader” in the comics (but not yet), in order to see if they can develop a cure. Meanwhile, Emil Blonsky quickly heals and is ready for another go, though now slightly unhinged.

What ensues is a race to get the cure, which has limited success, and Blonsky becoming the Abomination, a Hulk-like monster but with protruding bones , and a fight between the Abomination and the Hulk in Harlem.



Is it Good?

It's a mixed bag.

This movie was a bit better than I remembered it being, though still nowhere near as fun as the rest of the Marvel movie canon. The movie is a mixed bag. It has a strong performance from Ed Norton, the humor, like in all Marvel movies, is very good, and the movie has very fun fight scenes. But outside of that it struggles. The CGI of the Hulk still needs work and the villains are clichéd Hollywood military stereotypes you’ve seen a thousand times before.

First, the lead.

Ed Norton is very good. He gives us a Bruce that is likable but modest and unassuming. After watching this I have to say that he’s a better Bruce than Mark Ruffalo, not that Ruffalo is bad (he’s very good, actually) just that Norton is better.

Unfortunately, when he turns into the Hulk we see the movies first big problem. For reasons of either insufficient tech or insufficient money, the CGI for the Hulk, though a big improvement over 2004, is still not quite up to the level it would be in Avengers, let alone Avengers 2. He still looks a bit too much like a giant Shrek and at times I felt he looked a bit like a green, juiced-up young P.J. O’Rourke for some weird reason. Though, again, it is still an improvement over 2004.

Fortunately, if you can get past the CGI issues, the fight scenes are a lot of fun. The movie builds up anticipation for the Hulk each time, bringing us to the point that we are almost begging for the Hulk to appear, and unleashing him on the whoever has been asking for whooping. And the fight scenes, like with much of the pre-Avengers Marvel movies, are not the over-the-top destruction fests that now seem to dominate the genre. Today, the entire campus would probably be leveled, but here, we just have a simple fight scene on a quad between the Hulk and the military.

On the topic of the military, it is there we come to the movie’s most annoying weakness. This one has a slew of liberal, anti-military, Hollywood clichés.

Here are three questions that popped into my mind while watching the movie:
—Why the hell doesn’t General Ross tell the squad he sends after Banner at the beginning of the movie that the guy they are hunting can change into an enormous green rage monster at the turn of a second? That seems like something you want to bring up in the pre-op briefing. But I’m just a civilian so what do I know.
—Where the hell is the Congressional oversight on this? Two years later in the movie Iron Man 2 Congress would be trying to rip Stark over not letting the government have his suits but General Ross is able to do whatever he wants. Oh, and FYI, in-universe, Iron Man 2 occurs in the same week as this movie.
—On the subject of General Ross doing whatever he wants. Apparently full battalion, with machine guns-armed humvees, is able to just roll onto a college campus? Posse Comitatus Act, anyone? I’m pretty sure that requires at least an act of Congress to approve.

Yeah, this is not the worst handling of the military in a movie but coming on the heels of the fairly pro-military Iron Man and in a film series that has generally been pro-military, it was and still is quite jarring. The only real redeeming factor here is that William Hurt actually gives a pretty decent performance as General Ross, making him into a sort of Captain Ahab who has this mad obsession with the Hulk. You kind of feel sorry for the guy. Kind of.

As for the rest, the humor that is now trademark to the Marvel movies is funny. The side-performances are mostly ok, Liv Tyler is good in some scenes but there were a few I felt she was lacking. There are also some pleasant touches to the 1970s series, the best being the use of the iconic “Lonely Man Theme” as Bruce is traveling to the United States.

So, in all, the movie is ok. Not near the top but if you can get past the still-troubled CGI and the clichéd military then you will probably have a fun time watching it.

Summer of Marvel will return with a review of Iron Man 2, this time written by Andrew Price.


Bruce: "I can't get too excited."
Betty: "Not even just a little excited?"

8 comments:

tryanmax said...

I think the best move this movie makes is to not be an origin story, per se. We get the backstory in the opening credits and away we go. I'm hoping for something similar when they bring Spidey into the MCU.

Kit said...

Tyranmax,

I agree.

AndrewPrice said...

Kit, Nice review! I have to say that I am not a fan of the Hulk movies at all. To me, they've been dull and stupid. Ironically, I used to love the television series as a kid staring Bruce Bixby. But something about the films just leaves me cold.

In this case, I thought the effects were lousy. The acting was weak. I don't recall the specific military tropes, but it was obviously anti-military as I was watching it. What's more, I thought the fight scenes were ridiculous and ridiculously long.

I guess, I would conclude that I thought the film sucked... easily the bottom of the Marvel barrel in my opinion.

Anthony said...

The movie was't bad, but the fight with the Abomination was CGtastic. Both seemed to be near invulnerable and able to quickly heal from whatever managed to break their skin. So the final fight was flashy but utterly devoid of consequence.

I liked the opening chase scene in Brazil (even with the odd lighting changes) quite a bit and the Hulk's second encounter with the man that later became the Abomination was fun up until he decided to give the Hulk a free hit.

djskit said...

This is easily my least favorite Marvel film as well. I just didn't connect with it as I did on many of the others. I don't think I've ever sat down and watched it start to finish. That's saying a lot from a guy who's watched ever other Marvel Studios movie at least twice.

AndrewPrice said...

djskit, I feel the same. I normally like Marvel movies well enough -- some I really like. The Hulk movies never worked for me... though his good as a bit player in the Avengers films.

shawn said...

I liked it.

Prefer Norton over Ruffalo as well, but my understanding is Norton is difficult to work with, wanting to have script approval and be able to make script changes. The big problem with the Hulk is that he can be ludicrously over-powered and indesctuctable, which means leads to a lack of concern over whether he is in any danger or not. At least Superman has Kryptonite.

And finally, I enjoyed it much more than Ang Lee's 2003 movie.

Voz said...

This was way better than Hulk (2003). I enjoyed Norton in the role and wished he'd continued but Ruffalo has filled the purple shorts quite nicely in the Avengers films. It seems to stand out by itself even though it's briefly mentioned in Iron Man 2...I did like the references to the Harlem fight with Abomination in Netflix's Daredevil. On a side note, Daredevil on Netflix was great.

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