Review: Hulk
I took very low expectations to Hulk, which I saw with Leighton at Innaloo on Thursday night. After seeing a string of unimpressive action blockbusters (Daredevil, Matrix Reloaded and the acceptable but still ultimately poor X-Men 2), I felt that it was perfectly reasonable to fear that Ang Lee, with all respect to his undoubted directorial ability, would be unable to save a comic-book adaptation from the pitfalls that plague the genre.
I'm an Ang Lee fan. Of the three or four of his films that I'd seen prior to Hulk, the only one that had offended me was the tepid Ice Storm, with its lousy plot and uninteresting characters in search of permafrosted profundity. Whereas, on the other hand, I was a complete sucker for the cinematic beauty and genre-winking understated humour of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As for Sense and Sensibility, well I'm enough of a man to enjoy the odd happily-ever-after middle-class Austen fantasy now and again.
But could Ang Lee really interest me in a story about a mild-mannered scientist who (in the all-too-easily-explained inexplicable manner of comics) turns into a giant green angry ape when he gets riled? The answer, surprisingly, was yes. Despite the film having been previewed to me in various media as pretentious, overblown crap, I enjoyed it rather a lot.
I was quite happy to indulge the fairytale photography of the Banner backstory, complete with garden gates opening on to bleak deserts, and duelling plush toys, a visually symbolic feast which is later recapitulated with apocalyptic variations and pictures of empty swings in the shifting sands. The film is laced with rather blatant visual references to its character's emotions and psychology (mushroom clouds, closed doors, verdant gardens etc.) but these, along with the 'innovative' scene cuts (constant comic-panel-esque shot cuts, fadeouts and dragalongs), are to be enjoyed as cheesy, reverential trappings of the genre movie, not pedantically reviled.
I haven't seen Chopper (have a rented copy sitting on my coffee table right now, actually) but I've heard Eric Bana was rather good in it. He's far from brilliant in Hulk but does manage to exude likeability in a way that a lot of American actors of the Affleck mould simply can't. He just doesn't look like an arrogant prick, so when the unbelievably sleazy Josh Lucas character wheels and deals his way in, we're quite pleased to see him get his head beaten in by an empowered nerdy guy. Nick Nolte plays Banner's maniac dad as a grizzled trash-collecting perv genius, and some grey-haired yank with a stick up his bum plays the military man who's out to crush his mad scientist dreams forever. Even if Jennifer Connelly just switches into Beautiful Mind mode and mainly just sits there saying mildly assertive things while exposing her ever-so-charmingly bucked teeth, at least she isn't the abysmal Jennifer Garner - at least Connelly can act. So the acting in this movie isn't bad at all. It's a lot better than the competition.
What about the all-important action eye-candy? A leading complaint amongst reviews of this film that I've seen is that it takes too long to get into the action. Well, frankly, I thought all of its aforementioned contemporaries got into the action too fast, too frequently, and in too cluttered a way to hold one's attention. The fight scenes in Hulk, by contrast, are relatively few in number (I think there's only about three or four) and are charmingly goofy rather than trying to win you with 'beautifully choreographed' (read: implausible and overlong) action. I got quite a kick out of seeing the big green guy (who was well-animated in CGI that simply shouldn't be copping the amount of criticism that it is) pick up a twenty foot wide metal door that must have weighed about fifteen fictitious tonnes and throw it like a frisbee through a couple of solid concrete walls. The same goes for all the leaping about and tank-tossing. Much more entertaining than being asked to believe a blind guy in a red leather suit can do flips off the front of speeding motorcycles.
So, Hulk is not a masterpiece, but is strongly plotted for a comic book adaptation (it even waves the wand quite well with its scientific rationalisation for all the crap in it), has interesting characters (I haven't given a decent mention to Nolte and Elliot in the duel of the bad old men) and fun action scenes. It is good. It does drop off a bit towards the end though, in a completely unexplained and incongruous finale that was apparently inserted after studio focus groups weren't happy with the original. But we can imagine that the original Ang Lee - James Schamus monster-movie conception would have been perfect, and put down all the problems to the Hollywood studio machine.
I took very low expectations to Hulk, which I saw with Leighton at Innaloo on Thursday night. After seeing a string of unimpressive action blockbusters (Daredevil, Matrix Reloaded and the acceptable but still ultimately poor X-Men 2), I felt that it was perfectly reasonable to fear that Ang Lee, with all respect to his undoubted directorial ability, would be unable to save a comic-book adaptation from the pitfalls that plague the genre.
I'm an Ang Lee fan. Of the three or four of his films that I'd seen prior to Hulk, the only one that had offended me was the tepid Ice Storm, with its lousy plot and uninteresting characters in search of permafrosted profundity. Whereas, on the other hand, I was a complete sucker for the cinematic beauty and genre-winking understated humour of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As for Sense and Sensibility, well I'm enough of a man to enjoy the odd happily-ever-after middle-class Austen fantasy now and again.
But could Ang Lee really interest me in a story about a mild-mannered scientist who (in the all-too-easily-explained inexplicable manner of comics) turns into a giant green angry ape when he gets riled? The answer, surprisingly, was yes. Despite the film having been previewed to me in various media as pretentious, overblown crap, I enjoyed it rather a lot.
I was quite happy to indulge the fairytale photography of the Banner backstory, complete with garden gates opening on to bleak deserts, and duelling plush toys, a visually symbolic feast which is later recapitulated with apocalyptic variations and pictures of empty swings in the shifting sands. The film is laced with rather blatant visual references to its character's emotions and psychology (mushroom clouds, closed doors, verdant gardens etc.) but these, along with the 'innovative' scene cuts (constant comic-panel-esque shot cuts, fadeouts and dragalongs), are to be enjoyed as cheesy, reverential trappings of the genre movie, not pedantically reviled.
I haven't seen Chopper (have a rented copy sitting on my coffee table right now, actually) but I've heard Eric Bana was rather good in it. He's far from brilliant in Hulk but does manage to exude likeability in a way that a lot of American actors of the Affleck mould simply can't. He just doesn't look like an arrogant prick, so when the unbelievably sleazy Josh Lucas character wheels and deals his way in, we're quite pleased to see him get his head beaten in by an empowered nerdy guy. Nick Nolte plays Banner's maniac dad as a grizzled trash-collecting perv genius, and some grey-haired yank with a stick up his bum plays the military man who's out to crush his mad scientist dreams forever. Even if Jennifer Connelly just switches into Beautiful Mind mode and mainly just sits there saying mildly assertive things while exposing her ever-so-charmingly bucked teeth, at least she isn't the abysmal Jennifer Garner - at least Connelly can act. So the acting in this movie isn't bad at all. It's a lot better than the competition.
What about the all-important action eye-candy? A leading complaint amongst reviews of this film that I've seen is that it takes too long to get into the action. Well, frankly, I thought all of its aforementioned contemporaries got into the action too fast, too frequently, and in too cluttered a way to hold one's attention. The fight scenes in Hulk, by contrast, are relatively few in number (I think there's only about three or four) and are charmingly goofy rather than trying to win you with 'beautifully choreographed' (read: implausible and overlong) action. I got quite a kick out of seeing the big green guy (who was well-animated in CGI that simply shouldn't be copping the amount of criticism that it is) pick up a twenty foot wide metal door that must have weighed about fifteen fictitious tonnes and throw it like a frisbee through a couple of solid concrete walls. The same goes for all the leaping about and tank-tossing. Much more entertaining than being asked to believe a blind guy in a red leather suit can do flips off the front of speeding motorcycles.
So, Hulk is not a masterpiece, but is strongly plotted for a comic book adaptation (it even waves the wand quite well with its scientific rationalisation for all the crap in it), has interesting characters (I haven't given a decent mention to Nolte and Elliot in the duel of the bad old men) and fun action scenes. It is good. It does drop off a bit towards the end though, in a completely unexplained and incongruous finale that was apparently inserted after studio focus groups weren't happy with the original. But we can imagine that the original Ang Lee - James Schamus monster-movie conception would have been perfect, and put down all the problems to the Hollywood studio machine.
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