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Bruce Banner (Norton) is a man on the run from the military. He hides a secret genetic code within his blood that John Hurt and the rest of the military command want to use as the ultimate biological weapon. Banner, meanwhile, is hiding out in a third world country trying desperately to find a "cure" for the gamma ray induced defect in his blood; which, when his heart rate goes above a certain point, causes Banner to morph into a raging, angry, green beast that can "toss a forklift like it's a softball." The military signs on the best marine they can find (Roth) to capture Banner and bring him in alive. Of course, to be of any sort of match against the "hulk" that banner becomes, they treat this marine with a similar dose of radiation that enables him to regenerate quicker and perform physical feats no normal human could even entertain. Meanwhile Banner searches out his long lost girlfriend for help (who also happens to be the General's daughter) and a mysterious geneticist known only as Mr. Blue to help with finding a cure. A lot of running, smashing, throwing and fighting ensues.
Also kind of fun are the homages to the original television series of the 1970s. Not the least of which is the use of the familiar, lonely piece of piano score as Banner wanders slowly up a desolate road. A brief mention/joke about the purple shorts is mildly amusing and of course the quintessential Stan Lee cameo appearance. As cute/amusing these small homages are, The Incredible Hulk takes it a bit too far during a couple of scenes with a couple of other inside jokes and brief cameo appearances and it was difficult to keep from rolling my eyes at times.
The biggest problem facing The Incredible Hulk is it's similarity to just about every other comic-book, super hero movie ever made. Remember Iron Man from a couple of months ago? Yeah, this is the same movie; but instead of a misunderstood robot fighting a slightly bigger and better robot, this is a misunderstood mutant fighting a slightly bigger and better mutant. They throw each other around for a bit, smashing busses and buildings in their wake in the process. At least Iron Man had Robert Downey Jr to carry the whole thing on it's back so to speak. Here, it's just more of the same (complete with the evil, low-frequency voice over from the nemesis).
Sure it looks pretty good, but so what!? This day in age everything CGI looks pretty good and mentioning it almost seems superfluous. With hundreds of millions of dollars in the budget, I expect it to look kind of cool AND have an interesting story thread with decent acting. Nope.
Links: IMDb profile Official Site Flixster Profile for The Incredible Hulk
andrew@moviepatron.com | |||||||
reviewed by Andrew James
Norton, Hurt and Roth. Three extremely talented actors all agreeing to sign on here for one hulking paycheck. Roth is underused and frankly misused. Hurt is serviceable and is actually the best of the three, but his character is fairly uninteresting and unagreeable. Norton isn't quite laughably bad, but it's just flat enough to make me wonder what happened to the guy who not too long ago was doing class-act work in films such as Down in the Valley, The Painted Veil, or going all the way to the beginning for a rookie of the year performance in Primal Fear. Honestly, what happened!? Oh yeah, and Liv Tyler is in this too as the love interest who looks scared and screams a lot.
