Tom McGee's Blog

Iron Man has already left the the­aters around here, so I checked out the remake of “The Incred­i­ble Hulk” this afternoon.

After the intense silli­ness of the Ang Lee ver­sion of a few years back, one can under­stand Marvel’s desire to try again and do it right. I mean really, that long episode of Hulk jump­ing from mesa to mesa in the desert, swing­ing tanks around by their bar­rels, etc. etc. had all the drama and ten­sion of an apple falling off a tree. “Oooh, do you think it’ll hit the ground?”

Of course, with any super­hero movie the plot is almost inci­den­tal. Some­times they’ll hit a moth­er­lode with one plot devel­op­ment or another, but in gen­eral they’re all the same: ori­gin, cri­sis, a sight gag or two, hero saves the world (or some­thing), humor­ous coda. I find the ones where the hero saves the world to be in gen­eral the most tire­some. The smaller drama is more effec­tive. Super­man stop­ping one nuke in the first movie was more enjoy­able than watch­ing him stop all of them in the third (was it the third? I couldn’t even keep track after a while).

So first of all, Hulk saves a few blocks of Morn­ing­side Heights in upper Man­hat­tan. Chalk one up in the “pros” col­umn. For lev­ity, a very funny scene involv­ing a taxi on Cham­bers Street. The ori­gins are glossed quickly under the open­ing cred­its, and assume you suf­fered through the first one (or read a comic book or two in your youth) and don’t need any fur­ther briefing.

Then there’s the cast­ing. The hero him­self is crit­i­cal, of course; but the sup­port­ing cast is per­haps more impor­tant. What would the first Super­man movie have been with­out Gene Hackman’s hijinks as Luthor? More bor­ing, that’s what. On the other hand, give them too much lee­way and you end up with Jim Car­rey as The Rid­dler, and who wants to put up with that again?

Chalk another one up in the “pros.” You’ve got the depend­able Edward Nor­ton giv­ing his usual nicely lay­ered char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. Plus, Liv Tyler look­ing con­vinc­ingly rum­pled and un-perfect as his sci­en­tist crush. Also doing nice work are Tim Blake Nel­son as the man with the cure, Bill Hurt as Liv’s impos­ing mil­i­tary dad, and Tim Roth doing a fine job as the just-on-the-edge-of-psycho anti­hero. Also, a few neat cameos. Nor­ton shak­ing Lou Ferrigno’s hand and telling him, “you’re the man,” a brief shot of Bill Bixby, and one very amus­ing almost-throwaway in the last scene. I won’t spoil it.

As an extra bonus, there’s a nice open­ing sequence set in a pic­turesquely dense Brazil­ian slum. At least, I think it was sup­posed to be a slum. Per­haps a slum peo­pled with cute chil­dren and beau­ti­ful Brazil­ian mod­els? The chase sequence that takes place here after the mil­i­tary types track Ban­ner down is pretty cool.

I really haven’t gone to the movies much lately, so I’m in no posi­tion to tell you whether this is a bet­ter use of your ticket money than “Wall-E” or not, but it wasn’t a bad way to spend an after­noon. Give it three stars.