Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk

The Incredible Hulk [2008]

Everyone kept saying this as 'the black sheep' of the MCU, but... I really don't think so. The black sheep of the MCU movies really would be Thor: The Dark World, wouldn't it? Though this movie is certainly not as fondly remembered as the others. I kind of think that it's mostly because it was made with a different tone than the others, and that tone was a bit more serious and a bit more... rigid, I guess? Which is not to say that Incredible Hulk didn't fit into the MCU list of movies, because it does. But then thanks to fallout with the actor of Bruce Banner in this movie, Edward Norton, the Hulk was recasted in the Avengers, and while mentions to the events of this movie have been mentioned here and there, and General Ross (William Hurt) has shown up in at least three other MCU movies, so the events of this movie is certainly canon. It's just that, well, we probably won't be seeing characters like the Abomination or the Leader show up anytime soon. 

Also, interestingly enough, unlike all the other MCU movies up until Spider-Man shows up in Captain America: Civil War, Hulk is one of those few superheroes who already had a movie in 2003, and back then a lot of the audience isn't quite as familiar with the term 'reboot'. Which I think this movie capitalizes on by having Hulk's actual origin story alluded to in a couple of flashbacks, and starting off immediately with Bruce Banner already on the run. 

And I think that's more or less basically the whole movie, with the audience being introduced to Bruce Banner as he's on the run, as he's trying his best to survive and find a cure to his condition. We get a couple of tantalizing flashbacks and mentions to his gamma sickness as Bruce contacts his one ally, "Mr. Blue", while in hiding in Brazil. We also learn as the movie goes on that the experiment was originally meant to rival or recreate the Super Soldier serum... nothing too concrete actually is stated here about Captain America or whatever, but I did like the little nod of continuity. Meanwhile, General Thaddeus Ross, father of Bruce's ex-girlfriend Betty Ross, is on the hunt for Bruce Banner, who he views as a threat to humanity in general.

...and, for what it's worth, I do like this way of storytelling, where we focus so much on Bruce Banner as this man who's scared of himself, but also trying to understand his condition and minimize any losses of damage and lives caused by his rage-monster alter-ego. Unfortunately, due to being chased down and attacked by Ross's special forces team, led by the particularly brutal hunter Emil Blonsky, puny little Banner is driven to the point of anger that he turns into the Hulk. 

You have to think that Ross is kind of stupid here, though, for not actually telling his soldiers just what Bruce Banner is all about, other than the fact that they need to tranquilize him before he gets angry. It's understandable from a storytelling perspective since all of this builds up to an admittedly pretty awesome and tense scene as Banner finally shows what he's so afraid of and why he keeps track of his heart rate, but kind of a silly move there, Ross. After a bit of a conversation with Blonsky which has a couple of nice themes of soldiers needing to hunt and whatnot, Blonsky gets injected with a small amount of the Super Serum. 

In the second act of the movie, Bruce's attempts to find allies ends up with him in Culver University, and ends up meeting his old girlfriend (and Ross's daughter) Betty. But thanks to Betty's suspicious boyfriend Leonard Samson (who's later actually mortified at Ross's behaviour) Bruce's presence ends up causing the arrival of Ross and Blonsky. The battle here is pretty cool, particularly since we see the Hulk in broad daylight. Sure, the CGI is a bit more gritty compared to what we're used to in future MCU movies, but it's still serviceable and since this Hulk is intended to be more monstrous and less heroic, it works. Again, everything happens as you'd expect in a Hulk movie -- Hulk protects Betty, beats up the bad guys (Blonsky disobeys orders to fight him mano-a-mano and gets trounced), and Ross is more interested in taking out the Hulk. Kudos to William Hurt, though, for actually making General Ross feel conflicted and terrified when he sees Betty almost killed in an explosion. The sonic tanks in this fight is also pretty cool. 

Bruce and Betty go on the run and we get some rather fun scenes. The attempted sex scene; Betty being angry at a taxi driver... perhaps one of the few heartwarming scenes from the Hulk other than being 'smash' and 'protect Betty' is shown here when he roars and tosses a rock into a storm because he thinks the storm is bothering Betty. Again, it's kind of a shame that we never really got a proper movie to sit down and psycho-analyze the Hulk (Banner gets a fair amount of screentime in all the movies)... though I suppose Thor: Ragnarok does that in a way.

And this segment of the movie is a bit of a drag, admittedly, Bruce and Betty arrive in New York where they meet clearly-slightly-unhinged Samuel Sterns, who, with his homemade (!) scientific equipment, manages to create an antidote to Bruce's Hulking transformations. But then Bruce discovers that Sterns has been synthesizing his blood samples, all in the name of medicine. Bruce and Sterns goes into a bit of an argument over this, with Bruce obviously wanting all the gamma-tainted blood to be destroyed. This gets interrupted by sleep darts from Ross's team, causing Bruce and Betty to be arrested. 

However, Blonsky beats up his own military buddies and forces Sterns to inject him with Banner's blood. Obviously, this turns him into the Abomination, a monstrous... well, slightly-more-brown Hulk with jagged bones jutting out of his spines and arms. Sterns gets knocked out and his house gets blown up, though the audience does see a drop of Banner's blood enter a wound on his head. Then... then the Abomination rampages through the streets of Harlem. Kudos to those three or four random soldiers in a jeep who try their god-damn best to stop the Abomination, though. 

Obviously, we need the Hulk to fight Evil Hulk, so Bruce jumps off of the helicopter and after a hilarious almost-subversion, crash-lands and turns into the Hulk. The fight between the two is... it's pretty all right. As a kid I knew I had a bit of trouble following the two when we don't get a close-up of their faces... having them both be grimy-greenish-brown in low light doesn't really help, but upon rewatching the movie recently it's nowhere as bad as I remembered it to be. It's... it's pretty neat. There's a cool bit with Hulk's thunderclap blowing away flames; Ross gets to finally toss his hat in with the good guys and shoot Abomination with his helicopter, and Hulk uses some random chains to nearly strangle Abomination until Betty talks him out of killing the defeated enemy. After a peaceful moment with Betty, Hulk jumps away from all the soldiers arriving. 

The ending of the movie shows us Hulk in a random cottage in the middle of Canada and transforms with a smirk while the 'days since an incident' counts back to zero, an ambiguous situation that seems to imply that he's had some control over Hulking out. And, of course, Tony Stark approaches Ross at a random bar to talk about a 'team'. 

And... and, well, I get it. It's not as solid as a lot of the other MCU movies. But it honestly does what a Hulk movie really needs to do -- it hits all the right buttons. Bruce Banner being a scientist, Hulk being an angry rage monster that lashes out at everything, Hulk fighting the military, Hulk protecting the people who are nice to him, Ross is a pretty interesting antagonist... I will admit that the second act between the university fight up until Blonsky turns into the Abomination is a bit slow, but it's honestly just a nitpick. And, well, Blonsky... they could've given him something more beyond 'arrogant battle-hungry lunatic', I guess, though actually having Ross as a slightly more cerebral antagonist does work. Betty still doesn't really do much, though Liv Tyler had some fun with her role.

The movie itself is honestly pretty solid -- nothing it does will really surprise you, and if you're familiar with the Hulk character it's pretty much a by-the-books adaptation. That said, sometimes to introduce an audience to a character, sometimes that's all you need, and this just-a-solid movie, I feel, does lay the groundwork for how Hulk will be received in the greater MCU movies. 

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Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post Credits Scene: Tony Stark appears to talk to General Ross about how he's 'putting a team together'. Other than a neat nod to the upcoming Avengers movie and establishing this movie as part of MCU canon, though, nothing really came of this and one of the Iron Man movies would handwave this as something that didn't really come together. 
• Stan the Man:
• Stan Lee cameos as an unfortunate random civilian who drank a soda bottle contaminated with Hulk's blood.
• Lou Ferrigno, Hulk's actor from the 70's series, gets a cameo as the guard that Bruce bribed with a pizza. 
• Future Movie Foreshadowing: The biggest one is tying in Bruce's gamma radiation experiments and most explicitly the serum that turned Blonsky into the Abomination as being a Super Soldier serum (the program was 'put on ice', get the joke there?), tying it in to the then-upcoming Captain America movie. The Super Soldier serum is attributed to one 'Dr. Reinstein', which is an alias of Abraham Erskine. SHIELD also gets name-dropped briefly as one of the databases that Sterns hacked into. A news report briefly mentions a thunderstorm in the Midwest, which is the Thor movie. 
  
• Movie Superhero Codenames:
• As with these early superhero movies, the Hulk's name is used a lot more sparingly ("it was this huge hulk!" )
• Abomination is only briefly referred to off-handedly as 'the result could be an abomination' by Sterns, but is otherwise just referred to by his real name. 
• Favourite Action Scene: Hulk vs. Sonic Tanks outside the campus.
• Funniest Line: Bruce (as he's about to hit the ground): "OH SHI-"
• While they didn't do much in this movie, mad scientist Samuel Sterns is better known to the Marvel comics fanbase as one of Hulk's arch-nemesis, the Leader. Betty's boyfriend Leonard Samson in the comics is one of Hulk's allies, codenamed Doc Samson. 
• We get a bunch of easter eggs to the old TV series, like Bruce trying to say his catchphrase "you wouldn't like me if I'm angry" and mangling it because of his bad Brazilian; the purple pants, and Hulk saying "Hulk Smash" at one point.