It’s a strange thing being a sequel, especially when you can’t acknowledge it completely. You gotta build upon the ideas set up in the first film while also striding your own new and different path but recognizable in a way that the audience understands how you got from A to B. 

The Incredible Hulk is a bit of an awkward duck in the greater canon: the only one of the original phase one slate with one movie to his name, recast for subsequent appearances (whether or not it’s an improvement is subject to debate and I land frustratingly on the “they both have their merits”), and his side characters only really getting their due recently as creatives finally remembered we’re in the payoff stage of “planting and payoff”. 

The Pitch, if you’re like me and haven’t actually seen it all the way through: Bruce Banner and the US Army play a high stakes game of international cat and mouse as they attempt to deal with the giant green rage monster created the last time they worked together. 

I’ll give the movie this: it knows what it is and the performers are giving it their all, especially Liv Tyler who’s given the thankless role of “super’s girlfriend” but I believe her so strongly that I kind of lament the fact that we’re never going to see her again. In saying that however, there’s something just slightly to the left that throws the whole thing off in ways it’s near impossible to put my finger on. I’m gonna try and spend the rest of this piece figuring it out but I doubt I’ll succeed. Tonally speaking it’s out we’re playing this mad scientist story like the tragedy that the characters think it is with smatterings of action sequences when the tension gets to be too much. 

(Am I arguing that action movies are just musicals? Yeah man, where have you been?)

Bruce Banner is a better “mad scientist” than say… Victor Frankenstien (but that’s not hard to do as I remind you Victor was a college drop out and not even a doctor) and we can debate the ethics of self-experimentation until the cows come home but what happened to Bruce is an unexpected tragedy and, maybe to the detriment of the audiences’ enjoyment, the film treats it as such. Bruce wants The Hulk gone, and while some audiences know he’s going to ultimately keep his other rageful half, you have to do a lot of work to convince them that doing so is not an easy choice. Not one that wouldn’t immensely improve how Bruce Banner moves through the world. And for the most part the film succeeds until genre dictates that he must become his other half to save the day because it’s the only thing that will. Moreover, you’ve got the audience members who are maybe on Blonsky’s side of things going “why am I not submitting myself to unethical lab experiments in an effort to make me an indestructible superhero hm???” I don’t envy the creatives having to balance both of these expectations, of admitting “yeah the Hulk is super cool when he destroys tanks in a single punch, but what does that mean for Bruce, who has to deal with the consequences.” It’s the same question that’s more or less been asked since Jekkyl and Hyde and the answer is one that… well, as another version of this character will say, requires being “always angry.” An acceptance of that inner rage that perhaps was the reason that allowed The Hulk to come to fruition and by extension protect Banner. (It’s weird calling him Bruce. Pretty much everyone, save Natasha in the one movie we barely talk about, after this movie always calls him Banner, you ever realize that?)

Feeling bad for a piece of art makes no real sense. I think because it’s easy to pin down why you do or don’t like anything. It’s another to wonder why something that’s competent and making choices within its chosen boundaries isn’t clicking with you in the way the creatives intend to. I understand why we get the origin creation of the Hulk montaged over the opening credits, we’d gotten an origin movie five years earlier directed by Ang Lee. The score, composed by Craig Armstrong, is incredible at getting the right emotions out of me in any given scene. The character work is tight and trackable and if you asked me to track motivations on a scene to scene basis the odds are high that I could probably do it. Maybe the climax fight doesn’t do it for me? It has just one too many “no wait he’s up again!!”s for me.

(Would calling it a fakeout have been easier? Yes, but less specific.)

We are lightly playing in the sandbox that Iron Man started building for us, these movies came out the same year, so I’d put a quarter down on Feige hedging his bets just enough so that should one of them have failed he wouldn’t lose too much connective tissue going forward. That’s I think the strongest thing about Phase One’s origin movies, by picking heroes who’s origins aren’t so interconnected with the wider comic universe, one them not pulling the expected weight doesn’t yet doom the whole ship. 

We get our blink and you miss them gags: a Nick Fury reference in the opening credits, our first mention of the super soldier serum and it being property of Stark Industries, pushing things through SHIELD’s database, and finally Stark striding in through the door telling Ross “we” are building a team. Which is a little funny when we get to our next movie.

I think I understand why people don’t like this movie, but I think for me its biggest sin is sparking no real emotion in me. It gets a resounding “it’s fine” from me and that’s not what this movie wants me to feel. I don’t think that’s what any movie wants me to feel. I understand why they felt the Hulk had to become a support player, but there is something compelling in a Jekkyl and Hyde scenario where they’re aware of one another and one of them is an indestructible rage monster. Shame this movie couldn’t get us there completely. 

The only thing I can really note is this movie is remarkably Toronto based for a film set in New York. (The entire mid-movie fight was filmed at University of Toronto, which has stood in for a bunch of places and once you see it you can never unsee it. Because no one can deny those sweet, sweet tax credits.)Next up, we see how our new friend Tony Stark is doing in Iron Man 2.