It’s good to have an idea. Sometimes, though, you need more than one.
The Incredible Hulk shares The Big Idea that underlay the popular Marvel comic book. That is that scientist Bruce Banner, a strong identification figure for the comic’s young, mostly male readers, is seething with rage against authority figures who don’t understand him and don’t let him do what he needs to do. In particular, he resents Gen. Thaddeus Ross, his military boss and stern – and obvious – father figure (Marvel comics obsessively produced problematic “fathers,” which often led to the counter-balancing creation of alarmingly maternal girlfriends; Marvel was truly the House of Oedipus).
More than being enraged, Banner is afraid of his own anger that, once unleashed, might do harm to his loved ones. Unfortunately, his efforts to keep a lid on that rage is lethally undermined by those proverbial gamma rays (yes, I hate it when that happens, too). When Banner gets too upset, his distorting rage transforms him into the green-skinned, giant-sized, super-strong, inarticulate, not-very-introspective Hulk, who can be counted on to go on a rampage.
That’s really just a premise, though. Marvel’s writers and artists were able to develop it in three different ways. First, they had the advantage of serial storytelling; they could make up a new story, or new story segment every month, so they could string out plots with twists and turns that could be enjoyably inventive. Second, they could track Hulk’s struggles with his on-again, off-again conscience, a drama he undertook in lonely isolation. Third, they were able to work with the Banner persona’s ongoing anxieties over his self-control, anxieties which affected his romance with Gen. Ross’s daughter, Betty.
The makers of The Incredible Hulk didn’t have the advantage of open-ended storytelling, but they could well have mimicked the comic’s examination of rage’s consequences on the combined Banner/Hulk psyche.
Well, they didn’t. Instead they tried to lick the plot problem, with only mixed results. The film’s first half, during which Banner tries to hide himself from the world while he tries to find an antidote to the gamma rays’ effects, is a fairly satisfying account of how psychology trumps physiology, especially when you’re surrounded by creeps. But the second half consists of soulless contrivances designed to get us to the underwhelming video-game climax.
The Hulk himself doesn’t project nearly enough of the comic book version’s angst to make him anything more than a divertissement. He certainly doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner, whom he plays as such an agonizingly solitary figure that you wonder what the psychological source of his rage is. Jerks set Banner off, but that external motivation is the only type present.
Director Louis Leterrier previously made Unleashed (2005), a waste of its star, Jet Li, that could at least boast of a certain amount of perversity. There’s no perversity in The Incredible Hulk.