The Hulk | Review

Ang Lee takes Stan Lee’s green monster to new heights.

Part of my own repressed memories include the countless hours I spent glued to the tube with bad television from the early 80’s which were suddenly re-awoken when a flash cameo of Lou Ferrigno made its way into the intro, I’m pleased to announce that this murky action drama is given a fresh coat of green paint by a different kind of directorial vision. What happens when an art-house director frolics into the whole comic book genre? You get a whole bunch of CGI destruction and an interesting, dark character study. Ang Lee who treated us to the romantic martial-art opus with the award-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon brings us some more tree-top views with his take on a comic book legend.

Some mothers bring crack babies into the world; while some bring up babies who with the eventual shot of some gamma-ray will grow into the tragic story of a Frankenstein-like super-hero who belts out his emotions through his fists. This is a different kind of hero whose inner demons menace him and perhaps become his worst enemy, but for Lee whose films deal mostly with family issues, brings out a mega-magnifying glass to explore the relationship between father (Nick Nolte (The Good Thief) and son (Eric Bana Black Hawk Down). The first act takes a good deal of time to set of the Banner family tree and looks at how the son of a scientist, who is one himself, goes from an experimental tike to becoming a large green fighting machine. With flashes of a tragic story embedded in the film, Lee takes us thorough a visual neutron ride which goes inner flesh to intergalactic lands.

Lee excels in bridging the comic book world into a heavy drama, despite my early apprehensive thoughts after seeing the sneak previews; I thought that the CGI is surprisingly good and creative, bringing us the gamma afterworlds and some nice touches which show the facial expressions of the Hulk and matching it with Bana’s look and performance. Bana who gave us the person who you would most likely not want to meet in Chopper plays his role with conviction where as for Jennifer Connelly (Requiem for a Dream) it seems that she is on a path of female nurturer characters. The dialogue is strong and Elfman’s score contributes a sort of Hitchcockian Vertigo score which give a tragic edge to the film. The edits between the shots showed Lee’s other creative use for what would have become a zillion fade to blacks and the look gave us the impression that we were flipping through a comic book. Perhaps the film is a little long, but there are some really cool sequences-I’m thinking mainly of the lake sequence which is well worth the patient wait.

Friends of PETA should skip this feature and friends of Spider-Man might think of this film as being too weird, but an open mind can make one appreciate the emotion multi-layered first act and the untraditional dreamscape battle of the final act. The Hulk easily takes leaps and bounds over the rest of the films to come out of the comic book genre, under an Ang Lee treatment we get an overall ambitious take of a comic book character whose psychological profile and state-of-mind is equally distributed with the weapon of mass destruction scenario. Oh and I almost forgot, we finally get to see a realistic hulk bust out of his trousers!

Rating 3.5 stars