Any concerns over the involvement of director Ang Lee in a Marvel Comics project turn out to be not unwarranted. These concerns get immediately stirred up in the opening credits when you see, and hear, that the musical score has been ceded to Danny Elfman, who seems to have a virtual monopoly on such things (Spider-Man, Batman, Darkman, etc.), a textbook example of thinking inside the proverbial box. And they are further stirred in the first stages of the plot: the square-one biographical approach habitually taken in any comic-book superhero's screen debut: it will be fifteen minutes, and three child actors, before we reach the adult "Bruce Banner." Granted, there's more than normal justification for this traipsing through the hero's boyhood ("He's just so bottled up") and adolescence ("There's something inside you so special"), inasmuch as the slant is far more heavily psychological than the norm (way beyond the "revenge" motive of Batman, let's say). Nor does the psychological heaviness ease up after the hero, in a lab accident, absorbs a deadly dose of gamma radiation which brings out the Mr. Hyde in him: "The gamma just unleashed what was already there." What was already there, of course, was a blatant appeal to the underage audience of comic books: to their sense of powerlessness, their sense of specialness or differentness, their resultant feelings of rage, their fantasies of transforming that rage into power. Ang Lee's film, never deviating from an Oedipal orbit, is nothing if not self-conscious. The first appearance of the big green man, nearly an hour into the action, changes almost everything. It changes the film, for one thing, into a mix of live action and animation comparable to Roger Rabbit or Space Jam. To be sure, this is computer animation instead of hand-drawn, but CG imagery has always done better, for instance, with reptiles (Jurassic Park, Godzilla) than with flesh-and-blood figures, even if the flesh happens to be the color of a tree frog. This unjolly green giant never quite seems to occupy the same space, even the same realm, as everyone else. And once he begins to flit about the landscape like a flea, all that psychological heaviness comes to look more and more pretentious, more and more incongruous. One thing that does not change, despite any change in our perception of it, is the overall heaviness. Far from a kinship with your average superhero, the Hulk establishes a bond with the tragic figures of such grade-Z science fiction of the Fifties as The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, all the way to their miraculously stretchable clothes. Where he parts company with them is in his inability to be at once a source of tragedy and a source of fun. Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Nick Nolte. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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