tommx

i'll admit right out that the hulk was never quite a favorite comic book of mine. i tended to find the hulk annoying. my opinion changed when the TV series came around, and they managed to create a compelling tale out of this idea. while the effects were very primitive (with the hulk's green often wearing off of his body as he moved around), i could buy the show.

when the movie came around, i largely banked on it being an ang lee production thinking that he could make it really really good. boy was i wrong.

to begin with, the script simply doesn't work. i don't know whether the goals were too ambitious or what, but the result was endless exposition about something i ultimately didn't care about. the whole subplot about bruce's mother being murdered by his father did nothing for me. the hulk itself honestly made me laugh out loud when i first saw it. i just couldn't take it seriously or suspend my disbelief.

and nick nolte...oh my god...he was terrible.

i actually walked out of the theater on this one but later decided to check out the ending out of curiosity, thinking maybe there was something i'd missed or that i was being unfair. i wasn't. the ending is as laughable as the rest of the movie.

i guess the moral of the story is, don't try to make hamlet out of a comic book, and don't assume that just because spider man and the x-men translated well to the screen that every comic book hero is going to work as a movie. the hulk proved to us pretty tellingly that this is not the case.

let's hope they have the good sense not to try to make a movie out of thor. that would be even worse.