After the turn of Spiderman and X-men, it’s now turn of the incredible hulk to leap out from your marvel comic book, onto the big screen.
Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) is working for the government’s tissue regeneration project with his on-off girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly). During a freak mishap Bruce is exposed to gamma radiation which triggers the mutated cells passed on to him by his father (Nick Nolte), who was working on the same experiment. As a result, whenever Bruce gets angry he gets transformed into a very green and very big CGI generated hulk (a modern day Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde with an urgent need of anger management). This hulk looks bigger, hits bigger, jumps bigger, screams bigger and also bounces bullets off his green skin like a trampoline. To add some drama, Ang lee (of ‘crouching tiger hidden dragon’ fame) incorporates a do-and-die salesman who wants to get a piece of hulk to market and sell it, also Bruce’s psychotic father returns from the past with his mutated canines and turns out to be the hulk’s main nemesis in the end.
The whole movie is a roller-coaster ride where most of it is spent in, the characters as well as audience trying to decipher Bruce’s repressed anger and his subsequent antics. The only innovativeness that Lee shows is by using split screens with different parts showing different angles a la a comic book and It’s only in the near end that one is treated to some popcorn entertainment with the hulk taking on the might of the U.S. Army, and there too the CGI generation of the hulk makes it look more like a cartoon than a movie.
The problem with movies like ‘Matrix reloaded’ and ‘The hulk’ is that they tend to take themselves too seriously, in the bargain only appealing to some hardcore loyalists. The director’s forget that a movie’s aim is to entertain and not spout kitsch mumbo-jumbo which makes them come across as totally devoid of sense and substance.