From The Bottom Shelf – Hulk (2003)

From The Bottom Shelf: Revisiting old DVD’s I find on the bottom shelf of my collection, and trying to work out if they deserve your time, or not.

With the recent success of the Hulk character in the Avengers Assemble blockbuster from earlier in 2012, I figured it might be good to take a stroll back and have a look at one of his earlier film appearances: Ang Lee’s 2003 opus, Hulk. The film attempts to set up a franchise of films by giving us an origin story – how Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk - although truth be told, somehow this origin isn’t that interesting.

I’m not sure if it’s the dire scripting (no less than three writers worked on this thing, and about the only person with any depth to his character is the Hulk himself!) that kicks off the first half and never gets better, or Lee’s comic-book-inspired editing and cross-cutting effects, or even the lazy-eye acting from Connelly and Nolte, neither of whom are effective in their respective roles of Betty Ross and Bruce’s father David; perhaps it’s a combination of all three that lets this film sink into an abyss from which there is almost – almost, mind you – no escape.

When the film opens, Bruce Banner (Aussie Eric Bana) and Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) have just ended their relationship, while at the same time working together in a laboratory exploring the potential to regrow cells (I think) for medical advancement, a fact that put them in the glare of Government interest with potential military applications. Josh Lucas plays Talbot, a slimy Government contractor seeking financial reward for practically stealing the new technology. Bruce accidentally becomes irradiated with Gamma radiation while saving a lab assistant, and discovers that his body undergoes a metamorphosis when he gets angry – he becomes a giant green rage-monster termed “the hulk”. Betty’s father, General Ross, is tasked by the Government with bringing Banner to heel, while Banner is also pursued by his long-thought-dead father, David (Nick Nolte).

On reflection, there’s still plenty to enjoy about Hulk: you just have to wade through miles of crud to get there. First, the bad. Bruce and Betty have the romantic chemistry of two dead fish (ie, none whatsoever) and their recent relationship breakup is only barely hinted at in the opening: you have to wonder why the screenplay even bothered to bring it up, because it makes very little difference in the outcome of the film. Bana and Connelly never seem comfortable with each other as a couple, Connelly in particular coming off like a cold slap in the face as an emotionless, soulless creation – it’s as if she had no idea who Betty Ross actually was, and couldn’t find a core truth to the part. Bana, meanwhile, does better work when he’s being Angry Banner (and yes, he mumbles the famous line about not liking him when he’s angry several times throughout), although even he can’t seem to elevate what is a terribly convoluted and slow-moving script.

Josh Lucas hams it beautifully as Talbot, with just the right amount of menace and just the right amount of “boy, are you gonna get it” from the audience. Although his comeuppance is almost an afterthought, his presence as the key villain salvages this film from being an emotion-free train wreck. Nick Nolte, whose voice sounds like it’s still being carved from a granite outcrop in the Grand Canyon, does his typical wild-eyed hobo thing again, and he’s fun to watch, even if his character lacks genuine motivation.

The real problem with the film is more to do with the unfocused script than anything else – even Ang Lee’s typically magnificent direction feels hampered by a script more interested in exploding frogs, moss and dead tree stumps than anything to do with the Hulk. The opening twenty minutes of this film just draaaaags, with exposition sequence after exposition sequence killing what little momentum kicked off with a kooky, weird opening title sequence. The film’s “animal testing” opening feels contrived and poorly executed, although this soon shifts into second gear once Bruce is Gamma-ed. Dialogue drops to the floor with a clunk, there’s a serious lack of truth to character motivation (why does Betty dump Bruce? It’s not clear… and what is the root cause of the conflict between Betty and her father… that’s not clear either…) and things just… happen.

Once the Hulk appears for the first time, you spend the rest of the film anticipating the inevitable “Hulk out” that Bruce endures each time he changes, and change he certainly does. Bana’s intensity as Bruce is excellent, delivering an angry-man performance that’s far better than either Ed Norton (The Incredible Hulk’s Bruce) or Mark Ruffalo (Avengers Assemble) ever accomplished – however, the one caveat to that is that’s all Bruce is here: angry. There’s very little light and shadow with his character, and Bruce himself comes across as merely a vessel to transport the Hulk in – he’s not a real person, because neither he nor Betty are developed well enough for us to get ”into” them as characters.

The visual effects are excellent for their time, and many of them still hold up even now, some decade or so later. ILM’s rendering of the Hulk varys from wonderful (the brutal final act) to the excellent (the battle between Hulk and three very mutated canines) to the Learners Permit (first Hulk out in the Lab) – you can see ILM’s confidence with the material growing as the film progresses. Musically, the work by Danny Elfman here is pretty good, although I am not a great believer that his work on “comic book films” such as this and Spider-Man is the genre he works best in. His percussion based score remains a little fluffy around the edges when it needs to be razor sharp and powerful. At times, though, his soaring melodies work wonders – it’s a mixed bag.

The editing is where this film’s visual grandiosity comes to the fore. Using fades, split-screens and green-screen blending to transition between scenes and even between characters within a scene, Hulk is the most uniquely edited film I’ve ever seen. Apparently trying to ape the panels of a comic book, Lee and his team have delivered a highly stylized, very potent mixture of wipes, cross-fades and intercutting that aides the storytelling instead of hampering it.

The original Region 1 DVD, my source for this review, is definitely up to the challenge of delivering Hulk to the digital medium. Picture quality – even in 720i – is excellent, the resolution appearing stunning on my HD plasma. The film looks gorgeous, with great shadow definition and black levels, while fine detail is also pretty razor sharp. On the audio front, the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix remains up to the challenge of delivering the Hulk’s carnage in full surround glory. As far as standard 5.1 mixes go, this is potent stuff, with magnificent channel separation and bass response, with dialogue and surround effects given plenty of room to breathe.

On the bonus features, there’s plenty here, although they’re quite short and shallow. And entire second disc is goven over to some behind the scenes material, but it feels like slight, EPK-styled stuff than anything really deep and meaningful. The commentary, featuring Ang Lee, is informative yet strangely humorless (a lot like the film itself), but worth a listen.

Hulk isn’t as bad as its legend would have you think – sure, it’s not fantastic, and there’s oodles of problems to wade through in order to get to the good stuff, but if you persist you might enjoy bits of it. On the whole, I’m loathe to give it a pass mark simply for the terrible opening half, which lumbers along devoting entire minutes to watching frogs explode and over-long flashback sequences, but the final half makes up for much (if not all) of the shortcomings in the first.