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Sunday, November 22, 2009. New Comics in 3 days

 

Anger Management

By Kent M. Beeson

Monday June 16, 2008 09:00:01 am

Was there a comic-book movie that pissed people off more than Ang Lee's Hulk? I don't think anyone expected the director of Simon Birch to give us a definitive Daredevil, we all knew Schumacher was going to run the Batman films into the ground, and the casting of Jessica Alba as Susan Storm in Fantastic Four was pretty much the dead canary for that misadventure. But I think expectations were high for Hulk -- it had everything going for it. Lee was coming off the triumphant Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it featured a recent Academy Award winner (Jennifer Connelly), but most importantly, it was simply a fool-proof concept: man turns into not-so-jolly green giant, proceeds to smash. Ho ho ho, right?

Chances are, you already know the answer; chances are, you were there. Even though the film made its budget back and an equivalent amount overseas -- a modest hit -- it was still considered a failure, because audiences were angry, and studios don't like it when they're angry. Which is interesting; that must be one of the few times, maybe the only time, where an audience's critical reaction was regarded as more important than the film's box office take. (I've never met anyone who thought, say, The Grinch was anything but garbage, but I've yet to hear an apology from Universal, Ron Howard or the estate of Ted Geisel.) If that unfunny Robot Chicken sketch is any indication, the movie is now a synonym for failure, and not just any kind of failure, but failure born of overreaching pretentiousness.

So it shouldn't come as any surprise that once Marvel reacquired the rights to their characters back from the studios, they'd want to reboot the Hulk franchise. And yet, it kind of is. The Incredible Hulk debuts only five years after Hulk, and starting again so soon reeks, not so much of rapacious exploitation, but of embarrassment. As if Ang Lee's film was so terrible, such a blight, that a kind of cinematic reparation had to be made with the moviegoing public. Frankly, that's a stupid reason to make a movie -- rapacious exploitation looks positively honorable in comparison -- but given the chance to essentially rewrite the past and turn embarrassment into victory, who could decline?

The tragedy is that Lee's film, as odd and occasionally off-putting as it is, is terrific. Eric Bana and Connelly give sober, restrained, adult performances that give the film its atmosphere, while the action scenes have a calm, clear-eyed quality that is sorely lacking in today's agitated, Bourneified thrillers. But that placidity is contrasted by all the stuff going on in it. While Banner and Betty deal with the sins of their fathers, we also get macro- and microscopic visions of the world, where a desert landscape looks like a lichen and a lichen looks like a desert landscape. Borders -- between reality, memory and dream, between past and future -- are constantly crossed. The visuals are constantly violated and changed by disorienting wipes, dissolves and split-screens (anticipating the visual overload of Speed Racer), expressing the chaotic emotions of these inhibited characters. And finally, there's the anger -- the one thing that button-down Banner reins in and the one thing that allows the Hulk to leap over borders, physical and emotional, and finally confront his father. (Who is, for all intents and purposes, the Absorbing Man. Not just because he can become steel or electricity, but because all he does is take and take.)

If I've spent most of this column on a film that's five years old and targeted for a kind of purge, it's only because there's very little to say about The Incredible Hulk. It's paced well and there's lots of explosions and funny lines and a foe (Tim Roth as the Abomination) who can go toe-to-toe with the Hulk, and there's certainly nothing overtly wrong with it. If what you wanted from the 2003 movie was drawn-out, TV wrestling-style brawl for a climax, here's your movie. But it faded from my memory the moment I left the theater, like cotton candy on the tongue. Ten dollar cotton candy.

Why is this Hulk so lightweight? There's lots of potential reasons -- the simple, unchanging characters, the flat, dreary, filmed-in-Canada look, the floaty CGI creatures. But what really sinks The Incredible Hulk, I think, is that this Banner's green problem isn't really directly tied to any emotion per se, just his heart rate; so anything that might elevate it -- violent Brazilian factory workers, gung-ho British expatriate soldiers, inconsiderate New York taxi drivers or sex with Liv Tyler -- could change Banner into his alter ego. Any meaningful metaphor buried within the Hulk story is cut off at the knees -- instead of a story about repressed anger, it's a story about... I don't know. Power is dangerous? If anything, Banner's condition is about the rollercoaster ride of the movie itself -- when that blood starts a-pumpin', watch out! But that just means there's a tautology -- exciting things make people excited! -- where the movie's brain should be.

It's weird to me that Marvel, who know their characters back and forth, who made such a big deal about retrieving them from studios who didn't understand them, would make such a crucial error. It's like Ang Lee's film scared them so much that they felt they had to retreat into the very opposite, regardless what it was. "Come see The Incredible Hulk! It won't make you think -- we promise!"

And that depresses me, because they're probably right. I sincerely doubt that this new version is going to angry up anyone's blood, and that's our loss.

Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.

The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008

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