Comic-book fans eager for a Marvel mashup - Does Captain America have a cameo? Is that Nick Fury's name on a government document? What's Tony Stark doing in the movie? - can relax. The Incredible Hulk goes a step further, introducing (if not actually showing) Superman from rival DC Comics. The proof? A mere five years after director Ang Lee and actor Eric Bana brought the big green guy smashing on to screens, Hulk is back with a new face, a new love interest, a new back story and new stretchy pants, the better to preserve his modesty when he changes from scientist to monster. Clearly, Supe has been doing his fly-around-the-world-and-reverse-time trick.
The director this time is Frenchman Louis Leterrier (The Transporter) and the face of gamma-irradiated Bruce Banner is Edward Norton, who also co-wrote the script (as Edward Harrison) and, rumour has it, employed Method acting to become savage and wild every time he got angry on the set. On screen, however, he is the picture of restraint, and with good reason - if Banner's heart rate rises past a certain point, the transformation to Hulk takes hold. This means not only that you wouldn't like him when he's angry, but when he's harried, hurried, horny or even too hungry.
The movie opens with the back story told at blistering speed beneath the credits, the cinematic equivalent of riffling through 10 or 12 issues of a comic book. Experiment goes awry, Hulk trashes lab, Army gives chase, Banner escapes, girlfriend mourns - you know the drill. When the exposition slows, we find Banner living in Brazil, working in a soft-drink bottling plant and working on his Portuguese and anger management skills. The South American setting has two functions: letting Banner hide out from the U.S. government, which wants him dead; and letting Norton indulge his penchant for undershirts, which are to him what no shirts are to Matthew McConaughey.
The shantytown locales also let cameraman Peter Menzies Jr. show his stuff. From sweeping aerial shots to closeups of a chase through alleys and over rooftops, The Incredible Hulk features cinematography and editing to rival last year's The Bourne Ultimatum. Even in popcorn movies, good camerawork shows.
A little subtitle informs us that, like a factory trying for a new health and safety record, Banner has now gone 158 days without an, er, incident. But that's about to change. Gen. Ross (a cigar-chomping, medal-spackled William Hurt) has got wind of Banner's location, and sends a strike force headed by Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) to pick him up. Cue the angry growls, hulkish howls, and soldiers scattered like tenpins as Banner becomes Hulk and makes his escape, swatting at machine-gun fire as though it were no more than a swarm of mosquitos.
How someone who both resembles and reasons like a duffle bag full of watermelons manages to evade capture is never made clear, especially since it should be easy to track the trail of destruction and ripped clothing he leaves in his wake, but whatever. Banner finds his way back to America and Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), who is both his ex-girlfriend and the daughter of Gen. Ross.
Tyler does a good job with the never-meaty role of superhero's girlfriend, even though the requisite beauty-and-the-beast scene (during a thunderstorm no less) plays like a parody of the one in King Kong. She's smart, level-headed and keeps the screaming to a minimum. Norton pulls off a good wounded-but-dangerous look but is a little too cool as Banner, always pontificating in one language or another about how the army is more of a threat than the Hulk. At least Bana's Banner had the honesty to admit that a part of him liked losing control.
The supporting characters more than make up for Norton's nonchalance. Roth in comparison is all-chalance, going so far as to fight the green giant mano-a-hulko in one scene, and resorting to his own Jekyll/Hyde formula to recover from the beating he takes. (I would reference Roth's similar mysterious regeneration in the recent Francis Ford Coppola film Youth Without Youth if I could find evidence that anyone had seen it.)
Unfortunately, Roth's transformation merely serves to set up the clichéd conclusion (see Iron Man, Transformers etc.) of two behemoths destroying infrastructure and depressing real-estate values for several blocks in all directions. (And what insurance-claim box do you tick when your car is ripped in two and used as metal boxing gloves?) In an odd twist, this showdown uses Yonge and Gerrard as a stand-in for 7th Avenue and West 125th, wedging the famed Apollo Theater in between The Big Slice and The Zanzibar Tavern, and confusing audiences in both New York and Toronto.
Still, as with most superhero movies, this one does better at travelling hopefully than arriving. Its climactic tactic of "fight hulk with hulk" is so simple even the Hulk himself could probably say it. For all its ground-shaking, the final battle amounts to no more than a pause between the creation story we have just witnessed and the inevitable sequel. Movies have become their own trailers, counting down the days until the next "incident."
