Incredible Hulk (4 out of 4 stars)

Spoiler Alert

Yep, that's pretty much going to do it in for me as a film critic, at least when it comes to my wife's opinion of me. I thought Marvel truly hit this one of the park, though. I went in with really low expectations, since I thought the movie was going to be some kind of correction to Ang Lee's movie, which I kind of liked. I was hearing so much about it that I thought they were going to take all the artfulness of the story out. I was pleasantly surprised to say the least. Norton does a wonderful job as Bruce Banner, and I hope he fills out those purple pants a few more times.

One of the real stars, though, was Tim Roth, playing Emil Blonsky. He brought an obsession to the character that I'd never considered being there. Blonsky plays a mercenary of sorts - he's more natural warrior and fighter than he is patriotic or American. (In the comic, he was always KGB-trained, but here he's just from Russia, but educated in England). He's getting old, and while a career soldier, he is uninterested in moving up the ranks into Colonel or some other title. When he is confronted by the Hulk, and especially after learning that the Hulk is Banner, he becomes obsessed with him. So obsessed that he volunteers for a military experimentation using an ancient "Super Soldier serum," which hadn't been used on anyone since World War II. Yep, Captain America. I really like how they're weaving a lot of both canonical and non-canonical Marvel Universe into this. Eventually, Blonsky confronts Hulk himself, and you see him doing some seriously ill acrobatic fighting moves on Hulk, but it's not really a fight and Hulk does one of these 300 kicks, sending Blomsky flying into a tree and crushing every bone into his body "like ground up gravel." Ouch! Apparently, super soldier serum has regenerative properties because within two days his body is more or less completely healed, but he insists on more experimentation to give himself an edge in fighting Hulk.

You can feel the inspiration for the movie in Bruce Jones's more recent work on the comic, as I said. The storyline centers around Banner's gamma-poisoned blood. The government wants it, and Banner is a fugitive precisely because he's learned they plan to weaponize the Hulk if they can backwards engineer it. During his time on the run, he works as a day laborer in South America spending his days training with a martial artist who is teaching him both how to fight as Banner, but more importantly, how to use meditation, concentration and breathing exercises to control his anger. If his heart-rate rises too high, he'll transform and, in that form, he has no control over what happens. And since everytime Hulk shows up there's a minimum of $100 million in property damage, Norton understandably wants to keep it under control. One day, while working at the plant, he cuts himself, and a drop of his gamma-infused blood falls gracefully from the third floor of the factory and onto the assembly line below where soft drink bottles are being filled and packed for export to the United States. Banner stops the assembly line production but is unable to find where the blood actually fell - it went into a soft drink that was heading straight for Stan Lee's refridgerator! When the government learns of this outbreak, they send a team led by Blomsky to extract Banner quietly. There's a great chase scene over the rooftops of Rio where Banner is fleeing from agents, jumping from house to house. With clothing lines strung everywhere, agents run blindly across the rooftops, and in some cases, run straight off the houses, falling 2 or 3 stories to the ground. It was one of the best on-foot chase scenes I'd seen, and reminded me of older Alfred Hitchcock chase scenes, but which one I can't quite put my finger on.

Marvel seems to be laying the groundwork for a real reboot of the Marvel University on the big screen. You saw some of it in X-men and X-men 2, where we were given the names of people from Marvel Universe who weren't explicitly in the movie otherwise. That continues here. We are introduced to a psyciatrist dating Betsy Ross, who while we're not given his name, is almost certain Doc Samson. The anonymous person has been Banner's AOL buddy for years, helping him with developing a cure for his condition, turns out to be a cellular biologist named Steven Stern, or also known as The Leader. We're not given much in terms of an origin story to the Hulk, except for a 3-minute thing in the opening credits that was well done, but we're given fairly significant origin stories to The Leader and The Abomination. Both of them are derivatives of the Hulk, we learn. Blomsky, unsatisfied with the super soldier serum, finds Stern and forces him to replicate Banner's experiments using some of his diluted blood. This causes Blomsky to mutate into the monstrous Abomination, but it also causes Stern to receive a small, seemingly insignificant dosage of the blood too. During Blomsky's transformation, the lab is destroyed, and a drop of Banner's diluted blood drips onto Stern's forehead, which is cut from all the damage Blomsky's been doing. Immediately we see Stern's head mutate grotesquely, helping us know that we'll be seeing more of the Leader soon.

Finally, the fight scenes between Hulk and anything and anyone are awesome. You can feel Hulk's overwhelming power in every frame. He punches in a way that is like Mike Tyson - hard and fast. Hulk's also proportioned in a way that makes him seem like a perfect human specimen - except for the monster part, he's really beautiful to look at.

In the end, I came away from the movie impressed that Marvel had pulled it off. Like with Ironman, Spiderman and X-men, Marvel has managed to retell the essential parts of the Hulk story in a different medium, both translating something old in the process but creating something really new. It's also becoming apparent that Marvel's new studio has some fairly ambitious visions of where to go. Ironman and Hulk, it appears, are single issues to a larger storyline that will eventually be an ensemble team movie called The Avengers. Before that gets here, we'll get at least a Thor and Captain America story. Do movies do this? They do sequels and trilogies, but do they do movies which jump outside a specific franchise and cross-over like this? Tony Stark shows up in the end to throw out the idea for a team that would involve Hulk, as well as Ironman, to General Ross. Have we seen this before? It's very exciting, because if successful, it would create many future opportunities for Marvel Universe films that could maybe be less linear and franchise-specific. In other words, can they establish the Marvel Universe on the big screen? They appear to be trying and aiming for that. I gave Hulk 4 stars for its excellent execution, and its understanding of the audience and the source material. Great movie if you enjoy superheros. If you don't, probably not for you.