Emotionally damaged
Mark Steyn
Hulk 124, selected cinemas
Qn the cover of the first issue of The Incredible Hulk 40 years ago, the question was posed: 'Is He Man Or Monster — Or Is He Both?'
Well, that one's easy to answer. He's both. Sometimes he's meek mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner. Sometimes he's a big green rampaging behemoth. The trouble, from his point of view, is that the transformation from one to the other refuses to run on a regular schedule, being dependent on unpredictable factors like anger management. As a put-upon Bruce says in the new big-screen Hulk, feeling the green-eyed, green-skinned monster welling up inside him, 'You're making me angry. You don't want to make me angry.'
Fair enough. But I'd like to have been with him in the development meetings at Universal, growling to the suits: 'You're making me Ang Lee. You don't want to make me Ang Lee.' Sadly, they didn't listen. And Ang Lee, director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has gone to a lot of time and expense to make a summer comic-book movie that, for long stretches, looks like glacial out-takes from The Ice Storm.
The Hulk was created by Stan Lee as a Jekyll and Hyde for the military-industrial complex. Army scientist Dr Banner is working on the world's first g-bomb — gamma rays — and his concern for safety is beginning to irritate General 'Thunderbolt' Ross. 'Bah! A bomb is a bomb!' he scoffs at Banner. 'The trouble with you is you're a milksop! You've got no guts!' But, as it always does, something goes wrong, Bruce gets a jolt of gamma radiation, and next thing you know he's turned all big and green and burst out of his clothes, except for his pants. Evidently the only part of the Incredible Hulk's anatomy his shrimp-sized human garb is able to contain is his incredibly non-hulking penis.
Anyway, that's how Marvel Comics did it in 1962. By page 5. Bruce Banner's green and cranky and tearing buildings apart. That's not Ang Lee's style. Stan Lee gave us The Incredible Hulk. Ang Lee wants to give us a credible Hulk. Not for Ang's Hulk a simple shot of the old gamma juice. He too starts things off in the Sixties but only as part of a four-decade backstory so convoluted it leaves no room for frontstory. Bruce Banner is now the Hulk not just because of a big explosion but also because of a pre-existing genetic condition, an abusive father, repressed memory syndrome, and various other emotional troubles that make you wonder if the US military wouldn't be better off constructing the world's biggest couch for the guy instead of dropping bombs on him. Certainly that's the approach favoured by General Ross's daughter Betty, now upgraded from The Girl to a fellow respected scientist. 'I think your anger is triggering the nanomeds,' Betty tells him. 'Emotional damage can manifest itself physically.'
Not physically enough in this movie, whose monster moments are perfunctory and joyless. 'I like it,' says Bruce of his hulkiness. But you get no sense of that cathartic thrill from Lee's depiction. After a doomy titles sequence featuring lots of dissection of small invertebrates, green corpuscles pulsing around the bloodstream, and handwritten notes about 'bioluminescence', it takes an hour for Bruce to turn green and, when he does so, his first big showdown is with a snarling poodle. That's right: the big supervillain in this year's supposed summer blockbuster is a mutant French poodle. Crouching Poodle, Hidden Monster: not a recipe I'd recommend.
Presumably, this is some sort of jest on the director's part, in the same way that the clunky scenes of the computer-generated Hulk tossing tanks around are either an hommage to the original King Kong or because Lee is too much of a snob to get the effects right. But nagging away at the back of your mind is the suspicion that he doesn't quite believe in the source material, and so his solution is to affect an amused condescension to the comic-book bits and substitute a portentous, humourless, intellectually self-justifying dronedrama about the damaged progeny, Bruce and Betty both, of egomaniacal parents.
This tack would be persuasive if the nonstomping scenes weren't so turgid. Instead of the Hulk crushing 'puny humans' (as he calls them in the comics), it's left to the director to crush them. As Bruce Banner, Eric Bana (no relation) is not just nerdy but utterly unmemorable: unlike Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker in Spider-Man, he can't hold his own with his alter-ego. As Betty, Jennifer Connelly spends most of the movie lost in passively impassive reaction shots. I dunno what she's thinking about, but I found myself pining for the zaftig Jennifer of old. A few years ago, she looked fabulous: a 1950s starlet for the 21st century, all curves and what Ian Fleming used to call 'insolent breasts'. She and her She-Hulk-sized bosom seem to have shrunk in inverse proportion to the Hulk: her incredible bulk has shrivelled away to a dolorous cadaver with a cute l'il freckle on her upper lip. What a tragedy. In her scenes with Bana, both principals appear to be heavily sedated.
Meanwhile, the duelling pops are played by Nick Nolte (Bruce's pa) and Sam Elliott (Betty's). Nolte does more shaggy, mangy scenery-chewing than the French poodle, and blows it big time, I think. Elliott is ramrod-stiff, all brush cut and bristle moustache, and, though he's a repressed uptight square, he's the nearest thing to a character.
As usual with Ang Lee and his cinematographer Frederick Elmes, it looks beautiful: the Sixties army-base sequences are shot in dreamy pastels, like faded old snaps from your Kodak Instamatic or misty water-coloured memories. Lee even attempts to mimic the lay-out of comicbook pages, splitting the screen into panels and inserts, showing the moment from different perspectives, distances and angles, intersecting foreground and background. But the moment itself is dead, and what he's mimicking is not the style of the Hulk's original artist, Jack Kirby, but that of Kirby's successors in the Seventies and Eighties, whose fractured page lay-outs were themselves a kind of print version of movie editing. In imitating an imitation, Lee loses his grip on the storytelling. The most authentic touch is the Hulk's purple pants. Unlike the rest of the picture, they hold up.
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