director
Ang Lee
screenwriters
John Turman
Michael France
James Schamus
story by
James Schamus
based on
characters created by
Stan Lee
Jack Kirby
producers
Avi Arad
Larry J. Franco
Gale Anne Hurd
James Schamus
cinematographer
Frederick Elmes
music
Danny Elfman
editor
Tim Squyres
cast
Eric Bana (Bruce Banner)
Jennifer Connelly (Betty Ross)
Sam Elliott (General Ross)
Josh Lucas (Glenn Talbot)
Nick Nolte (David Banner)
Paul Kersey (Young David Banner)
Cara Buono (Edith Banner)
Todd Tesen (Young Ross)
Kevin Rankin (Harper)
Celia Weston (Mrs. Krensler)
Mike Erwin (Teenage Bruce Banner)
Lou Ferrigno (Security Guard)
Stan Lee (Security Guard)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 138m
u.s.
release: 6/20/03
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other ang
lee films
reviewed on this website:
- brokeback mountain
- crouching tiger,
hidden dragon
- the ice storm
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A scientist -- a mad, driven
genius, who has already conducted illicit experiments on himself
-- torments his baby boy in the crib and looks on, mesmerized,
as the squalling infant's legs break out in a veiny rash of green.
The baby grows up to be Bruce Banner (Eric Bana), a physicist
unwittingly following in the career footsteps of his long-lost
father; Bruce holds himself in tight, blocking himself off from
close relationships, as if afflicted by sense memories of those
crib days when anger led to physical deformity and misery.
What a strange and fascinating
contraption Hulk is. This movie about repressed emotions
and repressed memories is itself repressed: It withholds the
main attraction -- the roaring green Id, the Hulk, smashing everything
in sight -- for at least a full hour. The art-house director
Ang Lee would seem, at first glance, an odd choice for a summer
blockbuster about a green creature of rage. But repression has
been Lee's dominant theme -- from the virtuosos locked in by
duty in Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon, to the would-be romantic and sexual
adventurers thwarted by societal designs in Sense and Sensibility
and The Ice Storm. Lee approaches
the decades-old Marvel Comics character as yet another wanderer
in the void, denying who he is and what he wants.
Bruce, in the major change
from Hulk canon as set down by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the
comics and then by Kenneth Johnson in the popular TV series,
falls victim to gamma rays, which in themselves don't change
him; test subjects have tended to explode in the lab under the
gamma rays, and Bruce might have too, if not for the mutation
he carries in his own genes. Screenwriter James Schamus, revising
earlier drafts by John Turman and Michael France, adds a twisted
father-son layer to the narrative -- the sins of the father,
and so on. The father, David (a scraggly Nick Nolte), is a monstrosity
of scientific inquiry -- the type of cold intellectual who tests
his theories on his son. The elder Banner, just released from
a 30-year stretch in prison, has been busy: He has three canine
companions, vicious little things that get more vicious -- and
huge -- after he doses them with a serum.
Some of the movie could be
a little fresher. Bruce has a fluttery relationship with scientist
Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly), whose father is the blustering
General "Thunderbolt" Ross (Sam Elliott); General Ross
is in cahoots with slimy ex-officer Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas)
to claim Bruce's research for military purposes. Eric Bana, another
Australian actor breaking out in America (he starred in the small,
acclaimed drama Chopper), manages to look both strong
and weak -- close-cropped, wet-looking hair; pained soft eyes;
features just this side of chiseled. He can't get much going
on with Jennifer Connelly, who continues to come off as completely
empty, and the various forces weighing on Bruce's mind result
in a rather humorless performance from Bana.
Still, the movie gets one very
important thing right: the essential sadness of the Hulk.
As a child reading the comics, I used to feel sorry for both
Bruce and his towering counterpart, each forever doomed never
to know the other, bound together in fear and contempt and endless
retreat from men with guns. The movie's Bruce, however, feels
almost exhilarated by what happens when his Jekyll gives way
to Hyde; the sexual impaction of this buttoned-down, fearful
man letting himself rampage and destroy is hard to miss.
And what of the artificial
Hulk, as far from a green-painted Lou Ferrigno (who gets a sly
cameo here along with Stan Lee) as inhumanly possible? As with
Gollum in The Two Towers,
the computer-generated Hulk is too fantastical to achieve full
realism, despite his designers' devotion to detail. We accept
him, though, as a heightened projection of rage, and he's effective
in his gentler moments. I can't deny the visceral thrill of watching
the Hulk fling tanks around or literally spit metal at helicopters
to bring them down, but this Hulk is more about the traumas
that preface destruction. Nick Nolte and Sam Elliott, twin gray
remote fathers warping their children and growling at what they've
wrought, are the true dark stars of the piece. Hulk climaxes
on a phantasmagoric note that didn't quite do it for me -- it
plays like an Off-Broadway father-son confrontation that morphs
into a light show. Still, this jagged and highly unstable work,
bubbling in a stew of Freud and crackpot science, is the oddest
mix of concussive escapism and psychological duality since Tim
Burton's Batman. It may disappoint action fans, but it's
not really for them.
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