Movie Reviews

Ang Lee's Hulk (strangely, it's not called 'The' Hulk) is an unusual mixture of two different types of movies. On one hand, it's an artsy, thoughtful, deliberately-paced look at a bunch of emotions like anger, love, and loss. On the other hand, it's a comic-book action movie, with explosions, destruction, tanks, helicopters, and mutant poodles.

It's an admirable endeavour to try to combine two such disparate types of films, and it would take a very accomplished filmmaker to do it successfully. Ang Lee happens to be a very accomplished filmmaker (his last film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is awesome) and he does accomplish the feat... kind of. The first half of Hulk is mainly the artsy part, and while I wouldn't say it was slow, it certainly did seem to bore the hell out of the three very young kids that sat in front of us (it pisses me off when parents don't bother to find out a little about the films they're taking their kids too. They should've known this wasn't the kind of movie they'd like). I knew that this wasn't going to be another action-packed comic book movie, so I wasn't put off by the more deliberately-paced first half.

When the action-packed parts show up later in the film, they're a bit jarring because of how different they are. After a bunch of serious, emotional talk about repressed memories and childhood trauma, the fight scene between the Hulk and a pack of mutated dogs was really bizarre.

Most of the film is generally pretty good. Lee (Ang) is a really great visual director, and the coolest thing about Hulk -- aside from the great effects, which in my opinion were extremely realistic looking -- was the editing. The way in which one scene would jump to another were endlessly creative and brought a lot of energy to the first half of the film (for example, there's some great comic book-like split-screen effects and transitions). Lee (Stan) has written a pretty decent script for the film, but considering the 'artistic' nature of the film and the amount of time spent on the characters and their emotions, the script wasn't quite as interesting as I'd hoped for.

Hulk isn't the best comic book movie ever made, but I'd say it's probably one of the most unique.