 Ang Lee’s fluid comic book visuals in “The Hulk” are both original and useful. The film already feels so artificial that by the time we witness the Hulk’s digital fakeness, so laughably distracting when viewed without context, its garish green cartoonishness becomes an asset Commendably, Lee also departed from the norm by using special effects to supplement a solid story, rather than the other way around. As befits a movie about sublimated rage, much is left understated and the pyrotechnics are kept to a satisfying minimum.
The story could have used a dose of humor, however. Until a couple of years ago, comic book adaptations seemed destined to be either solemn angst-fests like “Batman”, “Spawn”, and “The Crow”, or completely camp, as in the later “Batman” and “Superman” installments. That changed with Bryan Singer’s “X-Men” films, which successfully sought and claimed a middle ground between tiresome self-importance and spandex shenanigans.
Lee should have followed Singer’s lead, because “The Hulk” is a real downer. Eric Bana’s Bruce Banner has brought self-repression to an art form, but sometimes, even when we know there’s an inner struggle going on beneath Banner’s stony visage, there’s not much onscreen to distinguish it from vacant dullness. Banner has a hint of “Othello” in him, but “The Hulk”‘s Shakespearean ambitions shouldn’t have kept Lee from honoring the humor and the pulp—in short, the fun—of the comic book medium. “The Hulk” is neither fish nor fowl, and unlike Lee’s exquisite “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, its disparate parts fail to cohere. |
