June 20, 2008
Cast: Edward Norton, Tim Roth
Director: Louis Leterrier
The Incredible Hulk stars Edward Norton as the guy in green. Now here’s a fantastic actor in a not-so-fantastic film that’s essentially just a bunch of big, explosive action scenes strung together.
Norton plays Bruce Banner, a scientist who when angered turns large and green, and you don’t want to be around him then. Banner wants to cure himself, he doesn’t like what he sees in the mirror when he gets mad, but a power-mad general wants to capture him so he can extract whatever makes him the Hulk and use it as a weapon.
Tim Roth plays Emil Blonsky, an over-zealous soldier assigned to hunt Banner down.
Amazed by the Hulk’s power and force, Blonsky gets greedy for the same kind of strength, and bullies a doctor into injecting him with a little Hulk juice that eventually turns him into The Abomination, the Hulk’s biggest nemesis.
Very different from Ang Lee’s 2003 film about the same protagonist, this film is a lot less talkie and a lot more hard-core action. The climax is one shameless special-effects heavy fight-scene between the Hulk and The Abomination, and if you think of it, it’s exactly like the big climatic action scene in Iron Man, which in turn was inspired by the big climatic metal-on-metal action scene from The Transformers.
With Edward Norton on board, I expected a more cerebral action movie, but this one’s for videogame-loving teenagers whose attention span is directly proportionate to how long it’ll take to finish that bucket of popcorn inside the cinema.
Two out of five. Strictly average entertainment.
(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)