Mean, green,
not lean

>>The Incredible Hulk is a lifeless reboot
of the comic book franchise

by MARK SLUTSKY

Five years after Ang Lee puzzled us all with his very particular take on the green-skinned bruiser, everyone has apparently decided to pretend that movie never happened and thus we have The Incredible Hulk, an attempt to “reboot” the franchise. Directed by Louis Leterrier (the man behind the Transporter movies), the movie features an all-new cast, a revised origin story and is pretty much as far from the refined weirdness of Lee’s film as possible, which you can be sure is the point.

Now it’s Ed Norton as Bruce Banner, who we learn in a speedy expository title sequence became gamma-irradiated during some sort of military weapons testing, causing him to Hulk out and hospitalize his girlfriend Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) and piss off her dad, General Ross (a moustache-heavy William Hurt).

As the film opens, Norton is in hiding, learning to control his anger and heartbeat in a Brazilian favela: why he chooses a crowded, noisy slum to relax in is never explained. (It’s also a remarkably poor choice from a moral standpoint, considering the population density of those neighbourhoods and the poor infrastructure. Really, if he did Hulk out there, the human toll would be incalculable. Shame on you, Bruce Banner!)

Hurt and pals, including special forces dude Tim Roth, track Norton down eventually, but they have to inject Roth with the super-special gamma ray weapons juice to bring him down, thus creating the movie’s super-baddie. Eventually, everybody gets together in Harlem (Toronto) and beats each other up.

Say what you like about Lee’s film but at least it was interesting. The problem with The Incredible Hulk is that the Hulk himself is, well, not that incredible. Norton is fine as Banner but the computer-generated monster he turns into is completely devoid of character; Lou Ferrigno is far more fun to watch in his 30-second cameo than this dead-eyed clod.

By film’s end, when good Hulk is fighting bad Hulk, it’s like watching two sweaty rubber gummi bears wrestling in oil. Speaking of Ferrigno, the crowd only really seemed to react to the various cameos in the film, which I won’t spoil here, but which just indicates how little life there is on the screen for the rest of the time.

The Incredible Hulk opens
this Friday, June 13

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