The Incredible Hulk.

"Like most Marvel Comics, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Hulk hit a nerve because it keyed into the readers' subconscious anger - the totally awesome idea of a great green stomping id monster lurking inside all of us, one we can barely control," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "But unlike Ang Lee's misguided, often awful opus, this latest film doesn't even bother digging into those pulpy roots, and instead settles for empty action-movie competence. [Louis] Leterrier's reboot might be a tighter, more coherent movie than Lee's Hulk. But it's also way less interesting."

"While it doesn't measure up to the lofty standard laid down by last month's Iron Man, this new Hulk flick is quite a bit better than the early skeptics would have you believe," Scott Weinberg assures us at Cinematical. "You could retitle this flick The Hulk is Bourne, and it would be a perfectly appropriate description (albeit a really awful pun)."

Updated through 6/17.

"For months stories have circulated that the persnickety Ed Norton, replacing Eric Bana as The Hulk's timid alter-ego, was demanding final cut over a screenplay he's said to have beefed up with chatty character-building sequences since excised," notes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "Add to that the critical drubbing Lee's take rightly received, and there's an inevitable and justly deserved fear: Hulk no smash. Cheers to lower expectations, then, because The Incredible Hulk is The Pretty Good Hulk. All things considered, of course."

Glenn Kenny's fairly sure that "it'll be better received by audiences than its initial and persistent 'bad buzz' had indicated." Which he knows quite a bit about, being on friendly terms with Norton and all. "But the larger question remains - if Edward Norton's idea, if your idea, if my idea, of an intelligent mainstream genre picture won't play with the money people, where the hell does that leave anybody's idea of an intelligent mainstream picture, period? I asked Edward recently if he wanted to discuss it; he e-mailed, sounding a little burnt-out, that it was not 'the time or the place to deconstruct.'"

For Jürgen Fauth, it's "as by-the-numbers as they come.... The Incredible Hulk is a crushing, noisy bore without a heart, brain, or single fresh idea. It's no accident the movie ends exactly where it started - plus a tacked-on final scene with Robert Downey Jr that tries to sell us the next superhero movie before this one's even over."

Earlier: Nick Schager in Slant.

Update, 6/12: "It might be time for Marvel to give up and recognize that the Hulk just doesn't work outside of a comic book setting," suggests David Berry in Vue Weekly.

Ang Lee "tried to make a thinking person's action movie, but ended up with a film suffering from multiple-personality syndrome, part dull and earnest, part mindless and violent," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "The Incredible Hulk, by contrast, embraces its identity as a sci-fi-summer-action-blockbuster extravaganza. Along the way, it actually comes close to finding the balance that Lee was looking for."

"Norton's conceit that Banner's transformation into the Hulk represents Gen-X anti-militarism is more pretentious than Ang Lee's comic book humanism," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

Robert Abele sketches a profile of Tim Roth for the Los Angeles Times. Cinematical's Erik Davis talks with Roth, too.

"[O]ne has to admit that enormous movie-making skill goes into the creation of pictures like The Incredible Hulk," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "The sheer craft directors such as Leterrier lavish on them is awesome to me. I can't imagine how they orchestrate - or even remember - all the little pieces of film they require to build their big set pieces. That thought, however, is nearly always followed by this question: Why do they bother?"

"While Lee's Hulk often felt inert, eventually building up to an incomprehensible climax, Letterier's hits all the usual action-movie beats before building to an inert climax," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

Updates, 6/13: "'The Adequate Hulk' would have been a more suitable title," suggests AO Scott in the New York Times. "There are some big, thumping fights and a few bright shards of pop-cultural wit, but for the most part this movie seems content to aim for the generic mean. If you really need a superhero to tide you over until Hellboy and Batman resurface next month - and honestly, do you? really? why? - I guess this big green dude will do."

"The makers of The Incredible Hulk throw all their energies into a few bowel-vibrating set pieces of varying impact, but they seem unable to sustain much else in this largely spiritless and often shabby effort," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Hulk more angry, yes, but not so interesting."

"It sidesteps the intriguing aspects of Hulkdom and spends way too much time in, dare I say, noisy and mindless action sequences," writes Roger Ebert. "By the time the Incredible Hulk had completed his hulk-on-hulk showdown with the Incredible Blonsky, I had been using my Timex with the illuminated dial way too often."

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw: "Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema."

Paul Constant in the Stranger: "As in many superhero movies, the third act has problems - how do you keep your villain from becoming a caricature when he's a giant evil monster whose sole motivation seems to be finding a really tough guy to fight? - but the movie is such great fuck-shit-up fun that it can successfully smash through any cliché in its way."

"It's a retreat to core Hulk values, a film of low risks and low yields, though not entirely without its own silly merits," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

The "transformation into someone with muscles where other people can't even imagine muscles is initially satisfying, but as generations of angry people have found before him, there's not much of interest you can do when you get that mad," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, where Chris Lee looks back on "Edward Norton's rocky relationship with studios."

Kevin Maher talks with Leterrier for the London Times, where Wendy Ide asks, "Is there even a spark of freshness or originality in this tedious film? Well at one point Hulk tears a police car in half and fashions it into a pair of makeshift boxing gloves, but that's about as far as it goes."

"Norton's an intriguing choice to play Banner," finds the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu: "good-looking, but not as cute as John Cusack; serious, but less intense or haunted than Sean Penn; fit, but not as buff or regular a guy as Matt Damon. This middling quality serves him well here, allowing him to slink into his character rather than trying to shape it into a personal vehicle."

"Leterrier and his team of CGI elves have worked hard to make the Hulk look 'real,'" notes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "They just haven't bothered to make him seem human."

In PopMatters, Monte Williams revisits the TV series and finds it "a surreal and intriguing extended metaphor for man's clumsy, half-assed attempt to embrace woman's changing role in the world."

Updates, 6/15: "One of the reasons that the Spider-Man movies, Iron Man and now this new Hulk, play so well with both huge audiences and (sometimes) critics is that the transformation aspects of the stories, allow the filmmakers to cast less hunky actors highly capable of wit, depth and emotion (Tobey Maguire, [Robert Downey, Jr] and now Norton) in the hero roles, something which nicely balances the dramatic and action scenes," writes Michael Wilmington.

Also at Movie City News, Leonard Klady: "What's chiefly intriguing and potent is that for all its anger management issues and inevitable effects charged confrontations it is a love story. It is Beauty and the Beast or King Kong and in the present landscape of angst ridden heroes, such an approach is refreshing. The emotional core provides it with a spine few of its recent brethren have evinced and whether intended or not (one suspects the latter) the film becomes a commentary on the entire genre."

A few of Slate's Dana Stevens's "observations culled from this two-hour onslaught of stimuli: The Hulk's transition from an amoral destructive force to a fighter for right happens too suddenly and without sufficient motivation. Liv Tyler, who plays Banner's biologist girlfriend Betty Ross, appears to be made of marzipan - sweet, pliant, and utterly bland. Tim Blake Nelson, the Don Knotts of his generation, kills in a small part as a socially awkward scientist eager to help the couple. And Robert Downey Jr, who pops up as Iron Man's Tony Stark in a cross-promotional cameo late in the film, is such a diabolical cad he makes the slender, diffident Norton look like a choirboy."

Justin Stewart in Stop Smiling on Iron Man and the new Hulk: "Alike in their weaknesses, the two movies both climax in audience-punishingly loud and busy street brawls between huge CGI lumps. Jon Favreau was able to practice some taste and patience during his movie's expository scenes, but Louis Leterrier's share his action scenes' incoherence."

Update, 6/17: Coming to the defense of Ang Lee's Hulk today are Ted Pigeon at the House Next Door and Erik Sofge in Slant.

Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2008 1:34 PM