Anger Mismanagement
After more than four decades as Marvel Comics' raging green giant, the once-incredible Hulk gets his own motion picture showcase. It's helmed by Ang Lee, Taiwanese director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, who injects art into his darkly ambitious interpretation while struggling to mix his intriguing ideas into a coherent potion. Consequently, his creature feature is a bulky, rather inarticulate beast suffering from philosophical constipation. No wonder he's so pissed off. But there's still much to admire in this valiant failure.
The cartoon Hulk was an angst-ridden swine, whose manifested id represented pure, rampaging youth-fury. He was an irresistible if simplistic paradigm -- he got angry and smashed things up -- and as drawn by Jack Kirby, seemed to burst out of the comic book panels by virtue of sheer pubescent spite. The original strip was shot through with sitcom irony, augmented by caveman one-liners and hopeless puns. Ang Lee shelves the camp humour for an altogether more earnest interpretation.
Hulk follows in the wake of associate Marvel adaptations Blade, X-Men, Spider-Man and Daredevil. But despite his pulpy roots, the movie version has more in common with classic monster movies like King Kong, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Frankenstein; a throwback to sci-fiction B-movies where the monster was purged by society.
The plot takes the form of a slow-revealing dream, punctuated sparely with a few disjointed, CGI-heavy action sequences. It's a thoughtful, character-driven affair, emphasizing the human story more than the special
effects. Lee takes ages to develop characters and situations, exploring a mini-series' worth of exposition before the action warms up. He has a surer feel for the mild-mannered portion of Banner's genetic make-up than for the livid green chest-beater. This will alienate the readymade teenage action audience who'll be fidgeting in their seats waiting for their first look at the green muscleman (Jungians, take note: Hulk first appears in Banner's subconscious, cloaked in shadow behind a literal door).
Lee, ever the visual stylist, lays on dozens of innovative visual techniques in his quest to approximate the natural eye-scan invoked by comic-book layouts. He employs a plethora of creative cuts, wipes, zip pans and dissolves; dynamic split screens suggest the panels of a comic-book page, and intensely tight shots of characters under stress connote the way comics zero in on big emotions. His direction is frequently over-the-top, with kinetic camera movements and a wide variety of angles and distances employed to capture the pop-art essence of the source material.
The Hulk animation itself is 15-feet of packed emerald muscle and Herculean fury, able to sprint like a cheetah, leap over mountains - a confounding revelation to witness - and withstand missiles. He looks more realistic in close-up or daylight than in the distance or the dark - but not much - and, like Spider-Man, he often moves with artificial, jerky motions. He's miles less convincing than Lord Of the Rings' Gollum and, while some scenes work better than others, effects fans will be not only be disappointed by the wasted potential, they'll be in fits of giggles during the moments when 
mid-paddy Hulk looks more like a pouting green baby than a ferocious creature about ready to pummel your face into a gooey pulp.
Aussie Eric Bana displays a brooding presence but such little else that one suspects that the CGI Hulk's human counterpart is made of wood. Jennifer Connolly works to elevate Betty above the standard squealing damsel-in-distress but, considering the role, this is doomed to indifference. Nick Nolte steals the show, chewing scenery as the menacing mad scientist, looking dishevelled in the manner of his notorious 2002 mug shot. But the ultimate confrontation between Bruce and his dad is overly contrived - before segueing into a perplexing, pretentious, Akira-style abstraction. If this is Lee's cinematic philosophy, it could seriously use some clairty - or at least a decent transliteration.
Lee's cerebral, experimental approach to Hulk is probably shooting over the heads of a core audience of comic-book geeks. The movie is also overlong, unflinchingly solemn, and could seriously use a dose of humour. Both storytelling momentum and plot clarity suffer along the way, but you have to admire Lee for attempting to do something different with a well-worn genre.
And, satisfyingly, there's still the question of how Bruce's size M pants remain intact after he's mutated into the enormous green brute.
-- Published by MovieSeer, 2003