Now and then a motion
picture comes along that actually deserves all those superlatives that clog the
daily prose of most reviewers, that sends them digging through their
thesauruses for bouquets of compliments, that inspires them to deploy all the
artillery in their sadly depleted arsenals of praise. The Hulk, alas and alack, is undoubtedly one of those pictures.
Like the huge title character, the movie inspires not only awe, but also a
certain amplitude in adjectives and adverbs — it is astonishingly excessive,
spectacularly violent, prodigiously long, ponderously slow, immensely
expensive, wonderfully stupid, and absolutely atrocious.
After decades of success in the
ephemeral world of the comic book, a couple of animated cartoons, and a
long-running television series, a theatrical movie about the great green
monster should amount to betting on a sure thing. Directed by Ang Lee, whose distinguished
career includes such titles as Sense and
Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and
most recently, Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, the film should automatically carry perhaps a trifle more prestige
than the usual summer blockbuster originating in a comic book. Even with the
considerable assistance of $150 million, however, the director’s experienced
hand and subtle touch cannot chisel any genuine emotional or intellectual
resonance from the crude materials of fantastic transmutation.
One of the greatest problems in the
movie derives from a script that apparently attempted to match the dimensions
of its protagonist. Instead of that old standby of comic book superheroes, the
scientist purposely or accidentally imbibing or injecting himself with some
secret formula, The Hulk constructs a
prolonged back story in reiterated flashbacks concerning the childhood of Bruce
Banner (the Hulk in mufti), his scientist father, his inherited genetic
inclination to change into the angry green giant, and so forth. It takes almost
an hour, in fact, for Banner (Eric Bana) to undergo the transformation we’ve
all been waiting for — some members of the audience may have felt themselves
congealing long before the protagonist — and vent his considerable anger for
the rest of the movie jumping about the landscape in his shorts, knocking
helicopters out of the sky, batting fungoes with a tank cannon, and ruining the
San Francisco skyline.
A number of visual allusions
underline the story’s dependence on myths of transformation and giantism, and
such literary and cinematic classics as Frankenstein,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and one of my own ace favorites, the 1933
masterpiece, King Kong. Perhaps
motivated by the size of the budget and the callow pretentiousness of the comic
itself, the scriptwriters provide a number of other, essentially irrelevant,
and mostly ridiculous stories and characters — Jennifer Connelly as the
Hulk’s love interest, Sam Elliott as her father (who also ends up nuking the
big guy), and above all, in one of the great examples of horribly hysterical
performance in our era, Nick Nolte as David Banner, Bruce’s murderous, demented
father. Most of the time Nolte delivers his lines as if they were in some
foreign language he hadn’t yet mastered. Both his speech and his actions
achieve a sort of perfect incomprehensibility.
Ang Lee, his writers, and a whole
township of set designers, scene painters, electricians, camera operators,
computer experts, and special-effects technicians of all kinds attempt to
mirror some of the appearance and tone of the comic book. Lee constantly splits
the screen to show the action as if it were occurring in those varied panels of
the original source, employs deep focus to shoot characters in closeup while
action takes place in the background, and now and then colors his scenes with
the smeary, limited palette of the comic artists. The considerable time devoted
to matters preceding the transformation involves just the sort of pretension
that the folks at Marvel Comics boast about — a heavy-handed exploration of
matters of paternity, identity, and destiny, with self-important references to
Greek myth, Beowulf, Sophocles,
Homer, and maybe a bit of Dante here and there. A little college is a dangerous
thing.
The bloated pseudo-intellectualism
of the script ultimately ends with all the usual battles and explosions, with
enough firepower to qualify as weapons of mass destruction, and then settles
into the pursuit of Bruce Banner. From that point on, paradoxically, the
picture actually creates even more boredom than all the shallow emotionalism of
the back story, achieving a more shocking transformation than Bruce Banner’s by
making an action flick duller than an Eric Rohmer domestic comedy, duller than
a Senate debate on agricultural policy, duller than the Golf Channel, duller
than Dick Cheney. Ang Lee’s Sense and
Sensibility actually exhibits more action, violence, and excitement than The Hulk.
The movie obviously demonstrates the
perennial theme of just about all the incarnations of the great green goon —
the transformational effect of anger on even the gentlest of beings. Like the
many manifestations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, it suggests the huge, raging beast that lurks within the dedicated,
sincere scientist. Except that in this case, no intoxicating formula, but
appropriately for our time, an artificially created genetic defect works the
metamorphosis. The Hulk’s rage, at least in part, springs from the manifold
frustrations of modern life, perhaps the one useful idea in this endless,
clotted mess of a motion picture.
The Hulk, starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh
Lucas, Nick Nolte, Paul Kersey, Cara Buono, Todd Tesen, Kevin Rankin. Celia
Weston, Mike Erwin; story by James Schamus; screenplay by John Turman, Michael
France, and James Schamus; directed by Ang Lee. Cinemark Tinseltown; Hoyts
Greece Ridge; Loews Webster; Pittsford Plaza Cinema; Regal Culver Ridge; Regal
Eastview; Regal Henrietta.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2003.
