The Hulk

Tension ran high among action cinephiles even before the first frame of "The Hulk," and not because of speculation that Jennifer Connelly was going to take her shirt off. (She doesn't.) Rather, the suspense centered on director Ang Lee, who has directed a Jane Austen adaptation, a tale of 1970s infidelity, a Civil War movie and a medieval Chinese martial-arts myth, but who had never before stepped up to the challenges of making the audience chomp its popcorn and cheer the thrills of pure, irresistible, larger-than-life action. We wondered: Would Lee master and surpass the conventions of yet another genre? On what part of "The Hulk" would Lee leave his mark? How would he step up to the challenge and make another great movie?

The answers to these questions are: No, The unnecessary parts, and He doesn't. Rather than simply spin a tale of Bruce Banner unleashing the green beast within and smashing stuff for truth, justice and some semblance of the American way, Lee attempts to rethink the Hulk's creation myth as just that: a real creation myth, with the tangled ambiguities, immense scope, and (not incidentally) patrilineal predestination of all the best creation myths from the Greeks on down. A project like that demands that the audience sit still and contemplate, not stand up and cheer, and for just that reason this movie will greatly disappoint its core audience. But such a project, properly executed, could be just as stirring and more meaningful than what a classic buster of blocks could muster.

Unfortunately, surprisingly and distressingly, "The Hulk," despite its distinguished helmsman, is an atrociously executed movie. Even myths, with their implicit grandeur and universality, need expositions that move more quickly and less awkwardly than "The Hulk"'s; the audience knows coming in that the mild-mannered dude's got a mean, green streak, and time spent punctiliously laying each brick of the groundwork for that discovery is time wasted. In the middle, given the extremely easy task of getting Hulk angry in a rousing manner, Lee only manages to do it once, and there certainly isn't enough smashing to make this a normal action film. The opening problem finds its symmetric counterpart at the end of the film, which features about three endings, none of which are entirely convincing, especially the one that, in the pointless decisions that allow its drama to flourish, brings to mind the Bond villain allowing James one last chat.

Myths rely on archetypal characters, so subtle personalities are not to be expected. But, to compensate, boldness should be these characters' watchword; instead, Lee and company make them so much slaves to their fear that they seem to shrink from the frame. If Eric Bana's Bruce Banner isn't going to open up to Connelly's Betty Ross, well (think all those audience members who are attracted to women), he better have a damn good reason, a demon roiling inside; instead, his character comes off as flat, thin and bland as Melba toast. Connelly is blankly pretty for most of the film, garnering pathos more with her high cheekbones and deep eyes than with, you know, acting. Nick Nolte spittles and rages his way through his role as Banner's father; at times, he makes it work, but at other times it's tiresome, unintelligible shtick.

The amateurish narrative and the hit-and-miss thespianism combine to make "The Hulk," at times, a ridiculous film, and that is the first time anyone has been able to say that about an Ang Lee joint. Yet it would also be wrong to say that there is no residue of Lee's designs on myth-making in this film. What persists after you've left the theater is not the plotting, or the dialogue, but Lee's faith in the evocative power of imagery.

Images fail this film for much of its length, it is true. Many say the cartooniness of Hulk himself as a computer-generated special effect ruined the film; I think other things ruined this film, but the green giant is certainly not what's memorable here. Lee's strategy of intercutting panels and frames onscreen does call to mind the experience of reading a comic book, and he takes care to ensure that the images in each frame are fairly stable so as to minimize confusion, but the rest of the movie wastes what could have been an exciting new filmmaking grammar. And Lee still can't direct action unless he has Yuen Wo-Ping (from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") to do it for him, as proved by a sequence when the Hulk fights mutant dogs that should be really mindblowingly cool but isn't.

But there are moments, ironically enough, in that enervatingly long exposition where the succession of images of fluids being taken up by syringes and DNA sequences being plotted on long strips of paper and organic matter flailing in extreme closeup, haloed by six gorgeous descending repeated woodwind chords courtesy of Danny Elfman, when it feels as if Lee really is investigating some mystery beyond us: the origin of life, the grossness and awesomeness of it, and the pitiable hubris of any intelligence that would try to force life beyond what it already is. The scenes in labs are easily the most compelling things in "The Hulk," and they do give the film a mythlike quality, reminding us of the eternal folly and damnability and beauty of the human striving manifest in the Hulk.

Otherwise, this film is pretty much worthless; about the only thing it does for the popcorn poppers, or for anyone else, is give them almost two and a half tedious hours to get to the bottom of that jumbo tub. But I'm willing to say that, even though "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" will be a lot more fun and (I swear) a better-made film, I won't remember anything from it as vividly and as tenderly as I remember those moments when Lee shows life at its smallest level. Does that make "The Hulk" worth nine bucks? No. I urge you not to waste your money on it. But as we embark on what promises to be a summer full of competent, characterless sequels, I'd still like to preserve that memory.

P.S. I don't mean to include "T3" in that last sentence, because it's going to be awesome. Hoo-rah! Johnathan Mostow, you're going to have done it again!

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