I'm not a Father's Day guy. It's a fake made up holiday built to sell cards and ties and knick knack crap with green felt on it. I demand no money be spent on me outside of a few homemade cards that I'll keep forever. BUT I will take advantage to spend a little 'guy time' with the little dude at the movies. Now, I get some criticism for taking they 7-year-old to the non-horror, big budget summer films as long as they're PG-13 and I've done some due diligence. It makes me happy to know that we'll do that together for years to come (until he's 15 or so and I'm no longer cool). He loves movies, he loves movie hype and typically likes everything he sees--to me he is the typical American moviegoer: give me enough explosions, car chases and special effects and I'll believe I've been entertained. After the movie, I always ask the same question:
"Did you like it?"
Here's how it went down this time:
"Did you like it?"
"Yes."
"Which did you like better? Iron Man or Hulk?"
"Iron Man."
"Why?"
He thought for a moment. I waited for it. Different fathers get the 'dad rush' from different things. Will this at bat yield a home run? Will this report card deliver all A's? Will this kick produce the winning soccer goal? (By the way, he's 2 out of those three). For me, this could be one of those moments. Will he get the criticism correct? Would he accurately see the main flaw in The Incredible Hulk at such a young age?
I waited with baited breath as we fastened our seat belts.
He drew a breath:
"In Iron Man, Iron Man was a real person. The Hulk was a cartoon and looked cartoony."
He nailed it. And on Father's Day, no less.
I don't need to go into much detail about Ang Lee's previous Hulk or how this film relates to that one, etc. Bruce Banner (Ed Norton) is already the Hulk here. A quick montage during the opening credits catches us up to where we need to be. The action quickly begins in Brazil where a reclusive Bruce Banner has taken a job in a soda pop factory while, after hours, he learns Brazilian (?!) anger management techniques to keep from Hulking out.
From imdb.com:
[Bruce Banner] desperately hunts for a cure to the gamma radiation that poisoned his cells and unleashes the unbridled force of rage within him. Cut off from a life he knew and the woman he loves, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), Banner struggles to avoid the obsessive pursuit of his nemesis, General Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt), and the military machinery that seeks to exploit his power. But all are soon confronted with a monstrous new adversary known as The Abomination (Tim Roth), whose destructive strength exceeds even that of The Hulk.
The Hulk as a chase movie (Ross chasing Bruce to regain him as a military possession) and a 'human' story is actually very compelling, well written and well-executed. The first two thirds of the movie were great and on par with any high-caliber Summer-type blockbuster. But then comes act III and with it the two main problems with the film:
1. Too many conflicts. There are too many story lines for this type of film. The same issue occurred with Spider-Man 3. Was that movie about Sandman, Venom, Son of Green Goblin, the relationship with Betty Brandt, the relationship with Mary Jane or good Peter vs. bad, dancing Peter? By trying to cram that much in, while keeping an acceptable running time you edit each component down to a point where they're rushed and potentially removable. Doc Ock gets his own movie but Venom gets 15 minutes of screen time? Ridiculous. Since when do we require so much to be satisfied as an audience?
Here, Tim Roth is introduced as a military zealot who admires the Hulk's size and strength and wants to be like him, taking a modified Gamma injection that goes horribly wrong. There's no motivation given for him doing this. The screenwriting team believing the Hulk needs one more adversary (which he didn't) and a Good Hulk vs. Bad Hulk climax (more on that below). Will the love between Bruce and Betty survive? The relationship between Ross and Bruce? Ross and Betty (his daughter)? And then the tacked on introduction to the next Hulk's villian, a nebbish scientist played (annoyingly) by Tim Blake Nelson that conducts an experiment on Bruce which leads absolutely nowhere. Why cram so much in and edit it all down to being insignficant?
2. The largest issue, getting back to my son's comment: The CGI absolutely sucks. The Hulk looks like a cartoon character in a 'real world'. The Hulk, essentially, is Roger Rabbit. In Jurassic Park you know there aren't really dinosaurs, but the CGI is flawless enough to believe the universe they've created. The dinosaurs, onscreen, are real. Same with T2. The Hulk (and Tim Roth's 'Bad Hulk') looks so fake and misplaced within an otherwise tangible universe that it takes you completely out of the movie. You can't care about cartoon characters so you don't care about The Hulk which is fatal for a character that requires the audience's empathy. Why CGI realism and technology seems to be going backward is a very strange question given the budget of these films.
But that it makes The Hulk forgetable is so simple a 7-year old can see it.
One interesting aside:
An accidently cut Bruce's blood drips into a full pre-capped soda bottle on the bottling assembly line. The blood dissolves into the soda, is shipped to the US and is consumed by cameo-ed Stan Lee who we learn in a later conversation (but don't see or get any follow up) gets 'Gamma Poisoning.' It's a lazy plot device wherein Ross can quickly find the origin of the soda and the location of Bruce.
This is the one thing that stuck with me from my Hulk experience. We are to assume that the relaxed quality control standards since this occurs in Brazil, that would permit this to occur. Could this happen in the US (bleeding assembly line workers dripping into my Diet Coke)? You hear urban legends of mice in the chili and a fingertip in the chicken nuggets. You hear about people bringing appropriately gross items into restaurants to pull a scam. Blood in the Brazilian soda. The one thing Hulk left me with: no more Joya for me.
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