Originally released June 20, 2003:

Comic book movies are all the rage these days. The X-Men films, Spider-Man, even Daredevil all managed some level of success because they were, at their heart, entertaining pulp and treated the source material with some sense of reverence. Now Ang Lee’’s monstrous film Hulk lumbers into theaters and one could best describe it as being too serious for its own good.

Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) is the quiet guy, the one who bottles everything inside. His lab partner Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) has recently broken off their relationship due to his emotionally shut-off demeanor. Well Bruce gets hit with a lethal dose of gamma rays and it kicks up something inside him. You see, Bruce’s long-absent father (Nick Nolte, looking frightfully like his drunken mug shot photo) experimented some kind of regeneration serum on himself. When he fathered Bruce he passed on whatever genetic alteration. So now when Bruce gets mad he turns into a 15-foot raging Jolly Green Giant (the CGI in this movie is not good). He starts enjoying the freedom letting go can bring. Nothing gets him more mad than some yuppie (Josh Lucas, badly miscast) trying to buy out his lab and then kill him to sell his DNA to the military. Along the way, Betty’’s father (Sam Elliott) tries to hunt Bruce and his greener-on-the-other-side alter ego for the good of us all.

Director Ang Lee has injected most of his films with a sense of depression and repression, from the biting and darkly astute The Ice Storm to the stoic Gary Cooper-like silence of the aerobatic samurai in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He’’s a master filmmaker without question. Lee bites off more than he can chew with Hulk much like the gifted Cameron Crowe did with the sci-fi Vanilla Sky. Lee is so damn ambitious that Hulk tries to be everything and it ends up fulfilling nothing. His film is the most ambitious and the most tedious super hero/comic book movie of all time. What does it say when the super green Hulk has more personality than the bland Bruce Banner?

The acting is a non-issue here. Connelly remains one of the most beautiful women in all of movies and has incredibly expressive eyes and brows. She has this strand of hair that’s always in the right side of her face. It’’s so awkward. Bana gets the least fun part as the mentally scarred kid afraid of his own anger. He doesn’’t do much but then he isn’’t given much. Elliott overacts with impressive gusto whereas Nolte overacts like every line was his last breath.

After about an hour or so of beleaguered talking and flat characters, I started to become restless. I wanted to see Hulk smash, Hulk smash good. Instead what you get is endless scenes of cheesy speeches, sci-fi babble speech, phony philosophy, and mind-numbingly awful pacing. Seriously, Hulk has worse pacing than glaciers. You’’ll see the Mona Lisa yellow faster than this movie will be over. And in some weird paradox, I think it’ will never be over.

Lee attempts to make the film a living comic book. You’’ve never seen this many wipes short of a Brady Bunch marathon on TV Land. Lee splits his screen into multiple panels and slides them around much like the layout of a comic book. However, this visual cue is overused and calls attention to itself in a “how-arty-are-we” kind of pretentious way. If Hulk was attempting to be a comic book movie, then where the hell did all the action go? This movie could have been subtitled The Hulk Goes to Therapy because everything excluding an over-the-top final act revolves around people working out childhood issues. Man, there’’s nothing I like to see more during the summer than a $150 million-dollar movie about – people working out childhood issues.

Hulk is an overlong and meandering film that’s incredibly serious, incredibly labored, and incredibly boring. Someone needs to tell the creators of this film to lighten up. The big-screen adaptation of the big green id may have heavy doses of Freudian psychoanalysis (try and tie THAT with the merchandising onslaught) but the film is barren when it comes to fun. Even comic book fans should be disappointed. I heard a story of a kid who saw Hulk and asked his mom when the movie was going to start, and she replied, “90 minutes ago.” Should you see Hulk in the theater at full price? No. Instead, give your money to me. It will have more resonance.

Hulk mad? Audience mad! Audience leave theater. See other better movies instead. Hulk sad. No Hulk 2. Audience happy.

Nate’s Grade: D+

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

Ang Lee’s Hulk is a unique experience that no other comic book movie has delivered in the ensuing twenty years. It’s clearly trying to do something heady, something more Freudian and psychological and cerebral, and yet it’s also doing so in a clumsy, wipe-heavy, panel-sliding bonanza of split screens and goofy transition shots. This movie would be fascinating to dissect if it wasn’t also so crushingly and unrepentantly boring. Even having seen the movie in 2003, I was still shocked how bored I was re-watching all 138 minutes in 2023. It’s such a strange experience to watch a movie that, at any moment, can be so weird and different, and then in the next minute make you contemplate doing your taxes again.

I think what Lee and his screenwriting partner James Schamus, who has written nine Lee movies going back to their very first, 1991’s Pushing Hands, were most intrigued by the Jekyll/Hyde allegory. Hulk is not alone in this regard in the realm of super hero dramatics; many characters lean into their alter ego as a form of personal wish-fulfillment, processing trauma, and/or freedom not allowed under their normal persona. The added complication with the Hulk is the monster factor, that when the man, Bruce Banner (Eric Bana), loses his temper and he unleashes his “big green id,” the ferocity he was holding back. The man/monster dynamic is what clearly interested Lee and Schamus, so we get plenty of dweeby Banner being bossed around and then confessing that, after his transformation, he likes it when he lets go and just succumbs to his more “smash everything” urges. However, this story angle is just crushed by the overwhelming weight of the overwrought psychoanalysis of Banner’s daddy issues and repression. The problem with this heavy-handed approach is that the answers are obvious and yet also confounding at every turn. Bruce’s father David (Nick Nolte) experimented on his own DNA, which he passed onto baby Bruce. The implications are used more as a handy explanation for why Bruce didn’t die from his fateful gamma radiation accident than as a cautionary tale of human experimentation. The repeated flashback reveals are drawn out far too long with the most obvious conclusions (Baby Bruce watched his father kill his mother and now he’s… upset). Every time his old family bedroom door showed up again, I would slump in my seat, losing more willpower. Likewise, it feels like Nolte is just crashing into the plot like an unwelcome sitcom guest, on a different acting plane and hamming it up as part-hobo and part-very transparent mad scientist. The man creates Hulk dogs from poodles and sets them on his son’s girlfriend. He bites a thick electrical cable like he’s in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It’s silly and not worthy of portentous psychoanalysis with a figure this one-dimensional. David is such a boring and obvious bad dad figure with traits of megalomania and score-settling, so Bruce’s daddy issues are an extended story obstacle I was eager to already have gotten over.

Then there’s Lee’s artistic decision to film the movie like a living comic book, with the screen transforming into the panels and splash page art of sequential media. The problem with this is that movies are already sequential media, they’re already one image leading to the next to create a specific artistic impression. Lee’s editing and visual artifice lets you know at every turn that You Are Watching a Comic Book Movie. It broke my immersion every time, and even worse it detracted from the drama of the moment. A poorly timed split-screen or image swap can create its own form of derisive attention. I challenge anyone to watch the demise of Josh Lucas’ smarmy corporate bully and celebrate the freeze frame that then gets engulfed with flames and speed wipes to the next scene. It’s reminiscent of 2008’s Speed Racer, a movie I also just recently re-watched for a new evaluation since it’s taken on a bit of cult status, where the screen is overburdened with oppressive visual gimmicks, many transitional, to make it feel like a living anime. The problem is that live-action is its own reality, and trying to duplicate one from the pages of comics or the screen of high-energy anime brings its own tonal risks. Some times an artist can perfectly meld the different worlds, like 2010’s Scott Pilgrim Versus the World or 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse, and then other times, most often, you get stuff like Speed Racer and Hulk, movies that are trying so hard and annoying you with their try-hard visual whimsy. It’s not pretension as I dubbed it in 2003, it’s more grasping desperation to ape the source material, and it gets oh so tiresome. You might as well turn it into a drinking game whenever there’s a snap zoom or a strange transition wipe that makes you roll your eyes or release a deep, lung-clearing sigh.

The special effects weren’t quite there at the time to better realize the big green guy, though they were close. Most of the brief Hulk appearances are during darkness, to better camouflage the special effects (naturally Lee would say it’s to build up anticipation, but I think we know why). The big action doesn’t kick in until 90 minutes, and it’s a long slog to get to that point, almost like Lee and Schamus were wanting to stoke audience rage, grumbling and demanding something get smashed after the protracted buildup to perhaps better identify with the hero. This is a movie with a Hulk poodle and Nick Nolte turning into an electrical monster (his infamous 2002 mugshot was mere weeks after filming finished). The abilities of the Hulk also feel inconsistent, and I’m not just talking about the elasticity of his pants never breaking. He can jump miles into the air from simply standing? The darker human impulses that gave birth to the Hulk are so emphasized that the green guy feels less like an alter ego or other half of Banner and more like a fleeting dream, a mirage of a character that is merely this boring man getting to feel like a big man. Even the dichotomy feels so overwrought and limited in exploration, settling on psycho babble patter. As I said in my incensed 2003 review, “This movie could have been subtitled The Hulk Goes to Therapy because everything excluding an over-the-top final act revolves around people working out childhood issues. Man, there’’s nothing I like to see more during the summer than a $150 million-dollar movie about – people working out childhood issues.”

This is an interesting misstep for Lee, who has since gone to win two Oscars for Best Director in 2005 and 2012. He was hopping from genre to genre with wild abandon. He went from a dark suburban drama to a Civil War drama to a martial arts fantasy to Hulk to an award-winning tragic gay romance to a historical thriller set in occupied China that earned an NC-17 rating to a comedy about putting together the famous Woodstock concert to a mystical fantasy drama about a man abandoned at sea with a wild tiger. Perhaps only Steven Soderbergh could cite a comparatively varied resume. Lee’s last two movies feel more like failed exercises in the technology of high-frame rates than complete or engaging movies. He hasn’t directed a film since 2019’s Gemini Man, though he has a movie dramatizing the Thrilla in Manilla in the works (NOT written by Schamus, at least as of this writing). The man’s artistic need to experiment with form and special effects is evident with the entire visual approach to Hulk.

You’ll likely never see another Hulk solo movie again, and that’s because Universal still owns the rights to the character, at least for solo adventures. So if Marvel were to give their version of Banner (Mark Ruffalo) his own movie, they’d have to split the profits with Universal, and even though the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has become the gargantuan money-making machine it is today, they don’t want to share the wealth. You’ll just have to enjoy Ruffalo’s appearances in Marvel movies and the occasional TV series, like last year’s She Hulk. It’s probably for the best considering that the character seems to work best as part of an ensemble rather than a lead, as also evidenced by the 2008 big screen Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton. The only lasting factor from that movie that carried over into the ongoing MCU was William Hurt as General Ross, and since Hurt passed away in 2022, he has been recast as Harrison Ford, so now there is no connective tissue at all between the last big screen Hulk movie and the Marvel movies.

My original review in 2003 was full of incredulous snark, much of which I can still feel to this day. I’m less angry by this movie, as it takes something really offensive to get under my skin as a moviegoer these days, unless you’re Dinesh D’Souza, but I’m just as baffled, not that the filmmakers wanted to try something more cerebral and psychological but that their idea of that was so murky and underwritten. It’s not a smart movie, and the visual razzle dazzle is distracting, goofy, and tonally incongruent with the overwrought attempts at drama, in between killer poodles that is. This is a curious movie, a rare example of talented artists really just fumbling at a high level of studio money. I felt bad for Jennifer Connelly who seems to have been given one acting note: look wide-eyed and stunned. As a superhero movie, and as a summer blockbuster, Hulk will disappoint. As an experimental big-budget Freudian analysis of the duality of superheroes, Hulk will also disappoint. This is such a strange and boring movie, but it’s not worth your time in 2003 or 2023 or any other year. The grade remains the same twenty years later, sad to say.

Re-View Grade: D+