Today, I took half a day off from my busy schedule of not doing much to watch The Incredible Hulk with a friend from high school. First, we went to a diner for lunch, where we were the only patrons under 50 and our combined ages were about 20 years less than the mean. You've gotta love small towns. Actually, it freaks the hell out of me because so many people live their entire lives here in this 10 square mile space and never leave. Just thinking about it makes me claustrophobic.
After lunch, we headed to a very small theater in a newly developed area. I think that the complex has been around for three years. Over the rare summer or winter break when I'm feeling less antisocial than usual, I meet my high school friends at this amazing coffee shop called Brewed Awakenings a few feet away from the theater. It absolutely has the best chocolate and coffee drinks with real whipped cream. The light, non-sweet kind with a hint of richness.
Actually, I wanted to watch Wanted, and google told me that it would be showing today. However, disaster struck when we arrived and the fifteen year old boy selling tickets told me that it wouldn't be out until tomorrow. Now that the summer blockbuster season is over saturated with superhero movies, I've lost a lot of my enthusiasm. It's hard to explain, but I hold some sort of a grudge against superheroes, especially ones with genetic mutations. X-Men is the only exception. After Iron Man, I knew that The Incredible Hulk would be a letdown.
Ed Norton is one of my favorite actors, so I wasn't exactly averse to watching him lumber around as a big green thing for two hours. However, this movie just reminded me of why I don't enjoy superhero movies in the first place. The problem is not that the characters are fantastically unreal. The real issue is that we have green people fifteen feet tall barreling across a college campus and people swinging on buildings in downtown Manhattan via silk strings. I just can't reconcile the idea of the paranormal inhabiting the normal. It would be all right if they were on Mars or another galaxy, but this is just insane. I know that the entire point of superheroes is to inhabit our world and inhabit it well, but it drives me crazy.
There are many issues with this movie, but its main problem was the lack of consistency. It starts off dark and cerebral, then disintegrates into a gratuitous action movie and not a very good one at that. Pick one angle and stick with it. Unlike Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Ed Norton was a poor choice for the Hulk. The monster is so divorced from the man that we never quite believe that feeble Bruce Banner is one and the same with the mountain of green slime. I also don't think that superheroes are terribly angsty, or they at least should not be so introspective on the big screen. Iron Man was always a man, and Robert Downey Jr. brought a mix of levity and gravitas to the role. Ed Norton seemed so doleful in his role that I couldn't figure out where the energy came from when he transformed into the Hulk.
The script is nowhere near as clever as that of Iron man, and Betty Ross is not nearly as appealing as Pepper Potts (Imagine having either name!). The story was also choppy and didn't coalesce as well. The acting was passable, though not noteworthy by any means. Although there wasn't anything noteworthy about The Hulk, I can't say that it was bad either. At least it's much better than Fantastic Four, which has some of the most hilarious acting I've ever seen and a terrible script. Surprisingly, The Hulk wasn't visually appealing. With their vast experience in producing these types of movies, you'd think that the Hollywood people would have gotten the graphics down by now. The entire movie was entirely forgettable. Given that my favorite scene is where Tony Stark makes a cameo appearance, it's obvious that this movie fell far short of my expectations.
