Marvel will kick Phase 4 off in a couple of months with Black Widow (hopefully) so I figured it’s about time to go back to 2008 and rank all of the MCU movies in the Infinity Saga in preparation. These will be spoiler reviews, as you’ve had plenty of time to see these movies by now and they’ll be actual review reviews, not “why this is great” or “why this sucks”. Reviews will go up every couple of days and we will move through the franchise chronologically and today we continue with the oft-overlooked, The Incredible Hulk.
This was a disappointing movie. I’ve never had the urge to go back and watch it after the first viewing, but I don’t remember it being this bad. Let’s start with the positives before I start ranting. The opening credits sequence does a solid job catching us up on Bruce Banner’s (Edward Norton) backstory, even if it really dates the movie (not that the effects or anything about it is necessarily bad, it just doesn’t look like something you’d see today) and the heart monitor is a clever way of building tension even before you fully understand that at a point, Bruce Banner will turn into a monster. The biggest praise I can give it is in Tim Roth’s The Abomination. The portrayal by Tim Roth is naturally great, Roth has a way of elevating even trash material that is given him, but honestly the material he’s gotten isn’t complete garbage. Emil Blonsky is actually a pretty great villain all things considered (he doesn’t quite fit into the story, but we’ll get to that). His pre-Abomination story is pretty solid, an aging soldier looking to become more powerful and coming face to face with this unstoppable force and wanting to be like it so he unrelentingly pursues that power is an interesting set-up for a villain because it makes him the underdog but still a threat, I only wish that he had more characterization once he became the Abomination other than CGI monster for the Hulk to fight.
Unfortunately that leads into the biggest problem with the movie, that final fight. Not only is it just a rather boring and bad-looking CGI monster fight (I get that other people like it but honestly, it’s just not bad, name one other MCU fight that’s as bad as this) but it just doesn’t work with the story of the movie (yes, they did set-up Blonsky earlier on, but you could cut him and the first two acts remain the same). Here’s the problem, the central conflict of the story is that Bruce is running from the government because the government wants to create Hulk-soldiers, now his problem with this as he states multiple times is that the government can’t make Hulk-soldiers because they won’t be able to control them, Emil Blonsky is an example of a Hulk-soldier that they can’t control and so the final thesis of the movie is that no one can control the Hulk, fine. However, Banner’s big arc of the movie is to stop running from the Hulk and accept control over it. You see the problem here? Now theoretically this could be fixed by Bruce never gaining control of the Hulk, but then that fight can’t happen because the Hulk wouldn’t be fighting the Abomination in that scenario, and plus even if they did find a work around, that means that Bruce Banner isn’t ready to join the Avengers because he’s still running from the Hulk. However, if they did the Civil War or Winter Soldier route and made it clear that the government was not worthy of control over a Hulk (which is an easy point they could have made, the army does attack a college after all) and they changed the final fight so that it wasn’t just a rando army guy running around with super-powers but an actual government sponsored enemy, then the story makes so much more sense.
However, even then the story has major problems. Stanley the pizza guy (Paul Soles) and Doc Samson (Ty Burrell) exist only as plot devices to create specific situations and really could have just been cut. And Martina (Debora Nascimento), who by the way I don’t think is named in the movie, exists for literally no reason as I can tell, she’s just kinda there to look hot for a bit which is really weird considering how important a couple shots at the beginning make her out to be. Then Liv Tyler’s character is tacked on to be a love interest with no other purpose and we already mentioned how Tim Roth, while great, is unnecessary and that’s a lot of unnecessary. And I’ve not even mentioned that the second act campus battle is just there to have another CGI fight and adds nothing of value to the story. A couple days ago I praised the relative consistency of the patched together Iron Man but this movie, which had less production problems (although there still were some) just feels like an absolute mess.
Then we get to the acting, while not bad, isn’t great. Frankly speaking, Mark Ruffalo is a better Banner than Norton is and I’m glad that things with Norton didn’t work out. I realize that sounds horrible, but Edward Norton is just very boring in this movie and I don’t enjoy his Bruce Banner at all. William Hurt is fine as General Ross, he’s kinda uninteresting, but I don’t mind that he reappears in Civil War and Black Widow. Liv Tyler is, as I mentioned earlier, pointless (I guess you could argue that she shows that Bruce can control the Hulk but that’s kinda vague and they could have worked around that) and it really doesn’t help that Tyler gives a paper-thin performance that does what the script needs her to do in a breathy voice. To be clear that’s not to say that any of these actors specifically are bad, it just seems like no one wants to be doing this.
Frankly, this movie can and really should be skipped. There’s not much to enjoy and although it does really cleverly tie into the MCU, it’s unnecessary to watch in the context of the Infinity Saga. Maybe one day Tim Roth will come back and wow us all with Abomination, making this movie seem better in retrospect but until then I don’t see much to like about this movie. Now let’s move on to the other bad phase 1 MCU movie... joy.
P.S. This didn’t naturally come up in the review, but the comedy in this is god-awful. I don’t remember a single time where I enjoyed a joke and I definitely don’t remember laughing.
P.P.S. Mr. Blue’s (Tim Blake Nelson) sequel set-up is so annoying, not just in the fact that it never panned out but also that it happens in the movie. I’d be fine if it was an after credit sequence but the fact that it happens right before the climax was such a bad idea. Also, his line before that “I hate the government just as much as anyone else” is such a weird line. Like I get that the government is generally bad in the MCU, but really? I don’t even know what to think about that line. It just makes me wonder why the writers hated the government so much.
Personal Rating: 6/10
Entertainment: ⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆ ☆
Depth: ⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆ ☆
Story: ⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆ ☆
Writing: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆
Acting: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆
Directing: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆
Comedy: ⭐️ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Tension: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆
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