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"All the Rage"

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on June 26, 2003 at 12:57:08

In Reply to: The Hulk posted by TomD on June 23, 2003 at 14:31:15:

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This unjolly green giant never seems to occupy the same space, even the same realm, as everyone else.

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Review by Duncan Shepherd
Published June 26, 2003

On the sliding scale of critical standards, "not the worst" has become a form of praise, however faint. And "the worst," though a seeming superlative, can no longer be limited to only one. The Matrix Reloaded, as an example, is without doubt the worst of the summer's sequels. But so are X2 and 2 Fast 2 Furious. And the imminent arrivals of the Charlie's Angels, Lara Croft, and Bad Boys sequels seem unlikely to reduce the number, highly likely to increase it. I expect, for various reasons, that the Terminator and Legally Blonde sequels will be not the worst. But I could be mistaken. The elasticity of that category is as yet unknown.

From this perspective, Hulk -- not The..., much less The Incredible..., but just plain Hulk -- can be said to be not the worst of the proliferating comic-book films. All the same, any concerns over the involvement of director Ang Lee in such a project have turned out to be not unwarranted. (My own concerns would have been greater had his most overrated work, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, not intervened since his most underrated, Ride with the Devil. At that midpoint, it was no longer such a leap to a Hollywood blockbuster.) These concerns get immediately stirred up in the opening credits when you see, and hear, that the musical score has been ceded to Danny Elfman, who seems to have a virtual monopoly on such things (Spider-Man, Batman, Darkman, etc.), a textbook example of thinking inside the proverbial box. And they are further stirred in the first stages of the plot: the square-one biographical approach habitually taken in any comic-book superhero's screen debut. It will be fifteen minutes, and three child actors, before we reach the adult "Bruce Banner" -- Australian actor Eric Bana, who, under a helmet of windproof black hair, rather looks as though he is auditioning for the part of Superman.

Granted, there's more than normal justification for this traipsing through the hero's boyhood ("He's just so bottled up") and adolescence ("There's something inside you so special"), inasmuch as the slant is far more heavily psychological than the norm (way beyond the "revenge" motive of Batman, let's say). The film, never deviating from an Oedipal orbit, features a pair of oppressive father figures, not only the hero's mad-scientist father (Paul Kersey in the early days, Nick Nolte in the present), but also the ramroddish military father (first Todd Tesen, then Sam Elliott) of the decorative heroine (Jennifer Connelly, standing by her split-personality man as she stood by the one in A Beautiful Mind). Nor does the psychological heaviness ease up after the hero, in a lab accident, absorbs a deadly dose of gamma radiation which, in combination with the doctored DNA inherited from his father, brings out the Mr. Hyde in him: "The gamma just unleashed what was already there." What was already there, of course, was a blatant appeal to the underage audience of comic books: to their sense of powerlessness, their sense of specialness or differentness, their resultant feelings of rage, their fantasies of transforming that rage into power. Ang Lee's film is nothing if not self-conscious. Even the irritating split-screen effects (sometimes just for a second camera angle on the same subject) can probably be justified as a replication of the juxtaposed panels in a comic book. It cannot be justified as seamless filmmaking. Seldom have the seams been more palpable.

The first appearance of the big green man, nearly an hour into the action, changes almost everything. It changes the film, for one thing, into a mix of live action and animation comparable to Roger Rabbit or Space Jam. To be sure, this is computer animation instead of hand-drawn, but CG imagery has always done better, for instance, with reptiles (Jurassic Park, Godzilla) than with flesh-and-blood figures, even if the flesh happens to be the color of a tree frog. This unjolly green giant never quite seems to occupy the same space, even the same realm, as everyone else. And once he begins to flit about the landscape like a flea, all that psychological heaviness comes to look more and more pretentious, more and more incongruous. (Am I saying I'd have actually preferred that the hero transmogrify into a Lou Ferrigno, to whom a bone is thrown in the form of a walk-on part as a security guard, or possibly into, for his name alone, a Hulk Hogan? Frankly, yes. I am.) One thing that does not change, despite any change in our perception of it, is the overall heaviness. Far from a kinship with the superhero of Spider-Man (likewise not the worst of the comic-book films), the hero of Hulk establishes a bond with the tragic figures of such grade-Z science fiction of the Fifties as The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, all the way to their miraculously stretchable clothes. Where he parts company with them is in his inability to be at once a source of tragedy and a source of fun.

[Review of 28 Days Later follows]

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