The Incredible Hulk

Review

What can you say about a man who leaps from a helicopter over Manhattan without a parachute in the hope that by increasing his heart rate he’ll transform into an iridescent lime-green behemoth so he can take on an even bigger behemoth? That he knows he’s living in a computer-generated universe in which gravity is a feeble suggestion and nothing is remotely at stake, and that when he hits the ground he’ll be replaced by a special effect. The Incredible Hulk is weightless�as disposable as an Xbox game.

It’s also fairly entertaining: swift, playful without pitching into camp, and acted with high spirits. It’s subtext-free�unlike its lumbering, Ang Lee�directed predecessor, Hulk, in which it wasn’t enough that Bruce had an anger-management problem: He was also a Freudian basket case with a buried trauma, something vaguely to do with his dad, mom, and a butcher knife. (This would be followed by an even more solemn misfire, Superman Returns, in which Superman seemed to have returned from Gethsemane.) With all its pretensions and no payoff, Hulk turned out to be a dreaded Franchise Killer, something scarier in Hollywood than mad-cow-tainted beef at a burger joint. 

The chief fault of The Incredible Hulk is that it aims to be the diametric opposite of Lee’s, and it jettisons what actually worked. Hulk had a slow, careful buildup, so director Louis Leterrier and screenwriter Zak Penn play the whole Bruce Banner�belted�by�gamma-rays thing in strobelike fragments over the opening credits. It’s like the projectionist left out a reel. Leterrier made the Jason Statham Transporter thrillers, which are so hyped up they don’t seem to have a present tense. The first half of The Incredible Hulk feels like one of those trailers where you think, �Are they showing the entire movie?� Yes! Things don’t settle down until Liv Tyler glimpses Edward Norton holding a pizza carton in a doorway and chases him into a downpour. She doesn’t care that he wrecked her lab, killed a few of her colleagues, and put her in traction. She wants to stand by her Hulk.

For Bruce, Norton is an inspired choice. His aw-shucks number is endearing, yet behind it there’s a trace of a sneer. Tyler, as a renowned scientist, doesn’t make Jennifer Connelly’s mistake (in the last film) of looking as if she has ever hovered over a Bunsen burner. She is blissfully unencumbered. She tries to buy Bruce pants with very elastic waistbands. When he mumbles something about having to catch a bus, she holds his eyes and twitters, �At least let me walk you to the station��and she’s so adorable you want to hug her with the biggest, greenest arms imaginable.

For a while, Leterrier wisely keeps those big green arms in the shadows, but when the Hulk explodes into the light it’s clear that Bruce’s anger hasn’t made him humongous�it has made him digital. (There’s more of a disconnect between Norton and his cyberself than there was between Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno.) The military throws everything it can at the special effect before it decides it needs him to battle another special effect�Tim Roth as the overweening Hulk-hunter turned hulkier hulk and driven insane with power. Like Iron Man, this is a movie in which the solution to terrible weapons we’ve built and over which we’ve lost control is more and better weapons. The Incredible Hulk comes down to child-men smashing things to demonstrate their potency�but at least the carnage is confined to ones and zeroes. — David Edelstein