Ebert Reviews "The Incredible Hulk" (2.5 out of 4 stars)

Ebert's review is up, and he's not that impressed. He opens with,

"The Incredible Hulk" is no doubt an ideal version of the Hulk saga for those who found Ang Lee's "Hulk" (2003) too talky, or dare I say, too thoughtful. But not for me. It sidesteps the intriguing aspects of Hulkdom and spends way too much time in, dare I say, noisy and mindless action sequences. By the time the Incredible Hulk had completed his hulk-on-hulk showdown with the Incredible Blonsky, I had been using my Timex with the illuminated dial way too often.

I quit reading after that, as a guy from church just invited me to the 10pm showing. This guy and I are still fanatics about comics and superheroes despite being grown men. We have different sensibilities, too. He literally walked out of the Ang Lee version a few years ago, but I really enjoyed it. We probably break similarly on a lot of movies if that is any indication. I personally liked Ang Lee's version, or at least, I didn't really mind it. The idea that Ange Lee would want to explore the psychology of Banner/Hulk makes sense, given Stan Lee made the Hulk to be - like so many of the other Silver Age heroes he created (X-men, Spiderman, Fantastic Four) - a new kind of hero who was deeply broken yet nonetheless heroic. He also appears interested in the idea of the Hulk as a metaphor of someone who has anger issues and when he gets mad, turns into a monster. Nothing wrong with that - in fact, it's because of the social commentary and psychological realism of Marvel's Silver Age heroes that these characters probably have been so persistent and consistently entertaining for comic fans, and I liked that someone like Ang Lee would want to take the subject matter that seriously. Ang Lee also seems interested in taking formulaic genres and then bending them to do something more generically human with them, whether it's a British period piece, a civil war era piece, a western, or a superhero story. Anyway, I suspect I'll enjoy the movie, but we'll see.

Update: I should plug, too, for Bruce Jones's run on The Hulk from 2003-2004 or so. I randomly came across this back in grad school one day. When school nearly drove me crazy, I would escape to Barnes and Noble for a few hours to get my head right, and so was keeping up with my people the entire time. I never read Hulk as a kid, but you can only go to the bookstore weekly to read comics so often til you've read basically every new comic you prefer. So I started reading some things off my radar, like the Hulk, and it just happened to coincide with when Jones took over the writing. I loved it. What I remember from the run was that Jones somehow managed to make this episode of Banner's life almost be taken out of continuity with the Hulk story. Not that anything explicitly contradictory happened; it just felt like a reboot was all. For instance, Banner is on the run as a fugitive because a boy was killed during a Hulk incident. This kind of storyline seemed like something that would've happened early in the Hulk's career, not now, so late in it. I hadn't seen Banner hitch-hiking alone, for instance, for literally decades, and even when I'd seen it as a kid, it was always in used comics. For most of my life, Hulk had basically grown up and gotten better - Gray Hulk, for instance, was a bouncer and intelligent, for pete's sake! Anyway, Jones got back to something raw and fundamental to Hulk's identity, and that had to do with the enforced solitude of Banner. In order to keep the thing at bay, Banner takes up yoga, and the scenes of him meditating, imagining a beautiful woman on a beach with some kind of mantra meant to bring him tranquility show up repeatedly in Jones' run, and there was something really interesting about it that I couldn't ever understand. I guess, again, I was more accustomed to seeing Banner trying to suppress the Hulk and ultimately failing, but in Jones' run, Banner is mostly successful, and we see Hulk rarely and sometimes only out-of-frame and just briefly.

The storyline appears to be largely influential on the current movie, and I'd noticed that, not because I knew what the story was about, but because of one shot of Edward Norton pulling a tight hoodie over his head. Banner in Jones's run is always wearing a form-fitting sweater with a hoodie. It has a sort of townie-hipster look, in a way - kind of cool and fashionable, but ultimately nondescript, if that makes any sense. Anyway, reading around, I see that Jones' run did have some influence over the current movie, even down to the choice of the villain (Abomination, who is the main villain in the Jones run), and the communications that Banner is constantly having with someone by email and chat who goes by "Mr. Blue." That appears to have been retained in the current movie adaptation. In the Jones run, I also remember that the government was after Hulk (again, classic), but not to control Hulk so much as to get Hulk's blood. That, too, appears to be in the movie. There was also this woman who couldn't die, and whom appeared to have super strength, but at the same time, would just chill out and be normal which was unnerving. That I don't know if is in the movie or not. Anyway, if it is like the Jones run, it'll kick ass.