The Hulk

THE HULK

Rating: C

Directors Gone Wild: The Movie.

I've ruminated before on these pages over how any one particular director gets the nod to helm one of these mega-budget "event" pictures. Essentially, that person is being handed millions of dollars for an assignment that would be almost impossible to screw up for anyone. (By the way, if your answer is "politics," you're probably not as uniquely insightful as you think.) So along comes director Ang Lee to reaffirm that, yes, it is possible to take a sure-fire comic book superhero movie and render it completely unwatchable. Maybe I owe those other directors an apology.

The problem appears to be that Lee thinks he's more important than the material. The audience goes in expecting a thrill ride and instead is forced to endure pretentiously bad opera. Instead of letting the story tell itself, Lee constantly interjects all these strange zooms and wipes and other gimmicks. It's as if he's telling us the material is beneath him, so he has to constantly insert his ham-fisted presence to "improve" upon it. There are so many ultra-tight closeups of all the actors, after fifteen minutes we know every pore and blemish in lead Eric Bana's face, and we're forced to admit Jennifer Connelly isn't nearly as attractive as we thought she was.

Amidst all the other gimmickry, Lee makes abundant use of multiple split screens, attempting to emulate the multipanel look of a comic book page. But I couldn't help noticing he even gets this wrong. In the comics, multipanels are most often used to link several connected events into a tight sequence. For example, in panel one we see the mad scientist drinking his chemical potion. Next panel we see a closeup of the test tube crashing to the floor. Next panel is on the scientist's eyes, as an angry malevolence builds up inside. Last panel (invariably the largest) shows the now-transformed beast bursting out of his lab, with a CRAAAAAAAAAAAAASH! boldly undulating across the page. Although the panels are sequential, the visual effect is of a single unified image on the page. Problem is, film language treats a split screen as depicting events which are occurring simultaneously, not sequentially. So Lee shows us multiple views of the same event, which is all rather pointless, and distracts from the action rather than enhances it. When I was reviewing Scooby-Doo, I noted how transferring a story from one medium to another necessitates changes to accommodate the inherent differences in the two media. Lee simply doesn't seem to understand this, and tries in vain to give us a movie that looks like a comic book.

The story is another problem unto itself. Bana is Bruce Banner, a scientist researching methods to make human tissue instantaneously regenerative. (At least I think that's what he was doing.) Something mysterious, which we could not possibly care one iota less about, happened to his parents when he was just a tyke, and now he shuffles through his days wearing a mournful deer-in-the-headlights stare which grates on our nerves even more than the kid in the row behind us. Jennifer Connelly somehow finds this lost-dog act attractive, which really irks her army general father Sam Elliot. I've liked Elliot in other movies, but here he goes through the entire movie with his head tilted sideways at a 45 degree angle, and seems physically incapable of shaving his mustache straight. (Then again, maybe the two are related.) Then there's Nick Nolte, who really, really should know better, who plays Bana's demented dad and holds some dark secret about Bana's origins. Someday, Nolte is going to play a character who doesn't look like he should be wearing a flea collar, but this ain't it. Bana's jerky-male-rival-for-Jennifer-Connelly's-affections-who-gets-beaten-up-by-the-Hulk (like you didn't know that was going to happen) is ostensibly played by one "Josh Lucas," but our more astute readers will recognize this as the alias Matthew McConaughey uses for his more embarrassing roles. ("Oh yeah?" you ask, "Then why didn't he use it for Contact then, hmmm?")

Certainly, this movie lives or dies by its visual effects. Truth be told, the computer-generated Hulk wasn't as bad onscreen as it first looked in the commercials. Maybe I just had time to acclimate myself, or lower my expectations. In some respects, I still prefer the approach taken with the Lou Ferrigno TV series - the scenes were more realistic, and the interaction between Hulk and other people wasn't so strained. At the same time, I realize the movie had to sell itself as bigger and better and larger than life as compared to the TV program. Which I guess means making the Hulk a digital effect. I'll give credit to the animators for their skill in manipulating Hulk's facial and eye movements to successfully replicate the way a human actor would approach it. And the care they took in getting Hulk's muscles and skin to interact realistically as he moved didn't go unnoticed. But at the same time, they made no attempt at realism for Hulk's trademark purple pants, which is curious since CGI cloth was a riddle solved years ago. And when Hulk runs or jumps, the action looks as phony as it ever did in the CGI world. When are they ever going to work out these kinks? Or don't they care?

Getting back to the story, there isn't one. One of the problems with the comic book was the fact the Hulk was this brutish, Cro-Magnon imbecile who would be challenged to outwit a houseplant. This severely limited the amount of intelligent action which could occur when Banner was the Hulk. Mostly, he just stomped around destroying tanks and crap. So in the movie, which remains true to the comic book in this respect, mostly he just stomps around destroying tanks and crap. There's not really any plot, and when it's over you won't be blamed if you feel you haven't even seen a movie. But be sure to buy lots of that cool Hulk merchandise.