The Hulk

(2002, Dir.: Ang Lee, with Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Nick Nolte, Sam Elliott)

The Hulk was never a favorite comic book character in my fandom days—as an expression of id he’s iconic but as a character he necessarily operated in a limited domain. Which is why, one suspects, writers of the series ultimately had to come up with Hulk “variations” to keep the motor running. The problem of the Hulk is circular: Bruce Banner wants to cure his rage, cure the rage and you eliminate the point, so no cure is possible, and it all becomes quite repetitive. Evolution of the character is forever stunted.

But as a two-hour film this could work (sequels, if they happen, will quickly creak under the weight of the built-in flaw of the premise). The result is Ang Lee’s latest genre-hopping venture, and it does work … sometimes. The screenplay has fairly dramatically altered the Hulk’s origin to add a father/son angle which Lee uses to prop up the psychological angle of the film. Unfortunately, this is the aspect that fails most dramatically, as the development of this angle comes in hiccupy fits and starts, never gaining traction. Bruce’s dreams are a flood of distorted, violent, Daliesque imagery. The man himself, as we are told in a too expository scene with his former flame, Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly), is cool and emotionally distant. (So is she, by all appearances.) His father is a ghost presence, turning up to haunt him at just the wrong moment. But none of this connects in a meaningful way; it’s all pop psychology with no foundation to give it weight.

The film starts to crackle when, finally, Bruce starts Hulking out. For all of the bad buzz, the effects turn out to be, if not groundbreaking, perfectly plausible (oddly, the least effective moments are wide-angle shots of what appears to be a moving green dot; the close-ups feel far more authentic). Although Lee overdoes the comic book stylings with a clever but eventually grating array of split-screens and overlaps, when the Hulk appears the film achieves a kinetic momentum that one wishes would carry over into the character development scenes.

Brief fun is to be had with Bruce’s father David (Nick Nolte) and Betty’s father (and old Banner nemesis) General Ross (Sam Elliott), but both of these characters are too one-note to stay involving: General Ross is Stern and David Banner is Crazy, and the brief attempts to humanize each come across as half-hearted.

The finale is whiz-bang sturm und drang and visually electric, but it comes out of a scene so contrived it takes a beat to get into the coolness. While it would seem that contrivance in a film about a giant, green manifestation of anger wouldn’t be a big problem, the effect is to take the viewer from inside the aquarium to looking through the glass, and neutering what should be the focal point. The more the “real world” scenarios play as contrived—all too common in The Hulk—the more the fantastic element seems only slightly more fantastic than the world around it.

It’s amusingly appropriate that in the end what fun there is to be had with The Hulk is contained in its mindless childlike exertions.