Movie Review: Ang Lee's Hulk [2003]

Hulk [2003]

I'm taking a bit of a break for this holiday season, so up until around... oh, the 28th or so, there are mostly just going to be pre-written stuff. It's not just anime reviews, though, and I'm going to include a bunch of these random stuff. Like, a review of Ang Lee's Hulk!

So in 2003, they did a movie about the Hulk directed by Ang Lee that was beloved by critics and absolutely hated by audiences, so much that the character was rebooted as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe a mere four years later as the slightly better received but still pretty middling Incredible Hulk. I watched Ang Lee's Hulk when it first came out, but I don't really have that fond of a memory about it, dozing off halfway through. I remembered that there were mutant monster dogs and the fight took place in a confusing pool against a big CGI monster, though. And I recently went back and rewatched it when people started comparing it to Logan.

And... and, wow, it certainly doesn't. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely good parts of the movie, but the 138-minute long behemoth of a movie certainly isn't a good movie by any stretch. Agony Booth did a pretty fun recap of every scene in Hulk, as well as its utterly bizarre editing method and random insertions of "symbolic" scenes, and the result is a movie that thinks that it is way more "symbolic" and "meaningful" and "introspective", when, no, it's just a poorly-paced mess that ends up looking silly by trying to insert as much psychedelic scenes as possible.

And I genuinely don't mind it when people try to take superheroes a bit more seriously by injecting some quiet drama within all the smashy-smash. I don't mind it if someone is so fascinated by the duality of mild-mannered Bruce Banner and HULK SMASH and feels compelled to try and analyze the mind of someone who has to share his mind with a rampaging evil monster whose primal anger may or may not have come from Bruce himself.

This movie thinks it does that, but it does no such thing. It flails around with random flashbacks and copious amounts of wacky symbolism and weird dreams and promises of some mysterious past, but fails to do anything about it. Throw in some absolutely godawfully long and redundant scenes at the beginning, downright amateurish editing (and I tend not to mention editing, but this movie's cut-wipes are insanely distracting) at some points, leading to the Hulk not even showing up until around the 45-minute mark, and some really questionable character motivations, and the movie is an absolute drag. 

Let's talk about the good stuff in this movie first, so it's not just a ball of negativity. Sam Elliot's General Ross is easily the biggest highlight in this movie, portraying a conflicted military man pretty well. Most of these superhero movies (including Ross's MCU-rebooted version) tended to just have the antagonistic military man be just straight-up an unreasonable villain, but Ross actually plays the part of someone who really, really tries to fix the relationship with his estranged daughter and tries to keep Bruce as safe as possible while still doing his orders to capture Bruce as a weapon. The conflict is there, and while Ross leans more towards being evil, Elliot plays up the anti-villain role pretty well.

Stan Lee & Lou Ferrigno!

Nick Nolte plays the main antagonist, David Banner, who is Bruce's crazy biological dad whose motivations is all over the place, initially as the Darth-Vader-style corrupter figure who wants Bruce to follow in his footsteps and claim his birthright, and then as just a crazy hobo fucker who wants to drain Hulk of his powers. Oh, and the movie gives David the powers of Thor villain Absorbing Man, which is... actually not that badly-shown via CGI considering this movie came out in 2003. But while the script behind David Banner really ends up causing him to look more like a crazy whackjob than any sort of villain with a coherent mentality, Nick Nolte chews up the scenery so much that he's easily one of the most consistently entertaining characters in the show. 

The rest of the cast... Bruce Banner (played by Eric Bana), Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) and Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas) are... serviceable. They don't get any chances to really ham it up, though, so they're just kind of there, reading lines that are honestly quite insipid most of the time. 

The movie's biggest flaw, though, is long, tedious pacing. And while any sort of slower-paced movie is going to be a doze-off for any sort of children audience (and Hulk was very heavily-marketed towards kids, as are most superhero movies), Hulk doesn't actually have any sort of payoff. The movie in particular has two long devoted sequences towards some mysterious event that happened in Bruce Banner's past regarding his fear of a door, scenes that are insanely dragged out with fake-outs in his dreams, but the revelation that "his dad went crazy and accidentally killed his mom while trying to kill him" genuinely feels anticlimactic, and not worth all the random buildup we've gotten. 

Another completely redundant scene that's there for padding and to add an aura of mystery? Young Betty's flashback in the military base, which ends with Adult!Bruce trying to strangle her. That adds absolutely nothing to the movie. Or the weird scene when Hulk is falling down from a fighter jet (that magically defies gravity and makes it into space) and has a random dream of the Hulk smashing out of a mirror and grabs Bruce, which comes bizarrely out of nowhere and has no real bearing to the story nor Hulk/Bruce's state of mind at that point. Another completely redundant scene is Bruce and Betty walking around in the military base -- at a point where Bruce was supposed to be captured and held as a prisoner by the military. Just so they have an excuse to visit Bruce's old home and see the oh-so-scary door that ends up to be an anticlimax. Throw in some genuinely bizarre plot points and character choices (which I won't list, the Agony Booth review/recap does it in a far more entertaining fashion than I did anyway) and the movie just drags on and on and on. 

There's an insane focus on dreams and a flashback and teases to some sort of huge event in their past, except the movie also takes the time to actually exposit about the exact events taking place in the past, which sort of neuters all the need of the flashbacks and makes them utterly silly. 

Also silly are the random cutaways to straight-up shots of random lichen and plants. And the extremely long way that they tried to explain the Hulk's powers with David mixing the DNA of chameleons, jellyfishes and sea cucumbers. Let's talk about Hulk's powers, by the way -- the movie does the unenviable task of trying to make sense of an old comic book superhero's origins, and tries to think up of some stupid-ass way to make it sound scientific. Let's recap -- David mixes up the DNA of multiple animals, injects it into his own, these powers gets passed down to baby Bruce, and then he gets shot with a dose of nanotech and gamma radiation, which allows him to transform into the Hulk whenever he is angry because of some bullshit emotional damage = physical damage = fight-or-flight response algorithm. 

This feels like a "the Force is Midi-Chlorians" situation, except where that scene was maybe one or two lines that is just handwaved away and causes people to groan, this lasts for a good two-thirds of the movie. And then, even if it doesn't make sense, David tries to replicate this whole experiment and ends up with a completely different and near-fantastical set of powers anyway. 

And, sure, the movie does have action scenes, even if we take what feels like an eternity to get there. Around the halfway point of the movie the Hulk fights a bunch of mutant dogs, which is quite surreal and silly at the same time. And in the final third of the movie, we get some actually decent scenes of the Hulk breaking out of the military base, fighting some tanks, fighting some helicopters, fighting a jet, and eventually fighting daddy Banner who got turned into a ball of lightning and eventually an entire lake. And Hulk defeats him by the silly anime trope of "overloading the enemy".

And if it was just the simplistic (and honestly pretty much padding) action sequences that's the crime, I'd call it forgiveable if the movie at least tries to do something with its concept. The scenes with the Hulk fighting the military was at least somewhat interesting. The fight between Hulk and Daddy Banner is just muddied and generic. Throw in the fact that the movie actually does a pretty piss-poor job at making the relationship between Bruce and David work -- I have a hard time that Bruce even has any sort of emotional connection to the man -- and the movie honestly doesn't even work as an emotional dissection of Bruce Banner.

So yeah... genuinely not a movie I enjoyed, one that struggles to even retain my attention while I was watching it, and one without a proper, coherent story running through it. I don't even mind darker, more melancholic superhero stories, but this one doesn't even have a point and can't even decide on what story it wants to tell, being caught up in "how can we make a weird dream sequence" than actually making an interesting mystery. Throw in some weird editing "meant to emulate comic books" that ends up looking amateurish instead, and this is definitely not a film I will recommended.