jbanet

When I first saw previews for this movie, I expected a soulless comedy about restaurant staff messing with customers. Although some people may feel that way even after seeing it, I was pleasantly surprised. From the introduction of 'the game' near the beginning of the movie, I knew this was going to be more interesting and even more disturbing than the previews.

Despite what appears to be rather thin characterization, 'Waiting' succeeds at being a good character-driven movie. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps what seem to be just childish antics add depth to the characters without us realizing it. Some people complain that 'the game' is a 10 second gag stretched out for the entire film, and on the surface, this is true. However, the game is really more of a mechanism for developing characters than anything on its own. The result is a set of very flawed, but surprisingly likable characters. Also, the ending, though a little abrupt, is entertaining largely because the movie does a good job of setting up the characters and situation.

This movie is not for everyone. If you do not like 'stupid' humor, then you will probably not be able to overlook that to enjoy the more subtle aspects. However, once you get past that, this movie is more than the sum of its parts.

I went to this movie expecting the raw emotion of the hulk to really pull the audience in, to make us feel for him, to make us get angry along with him. What I got was a lot of characters yelling, crying, and trying very hard to appear emotional, but coming off forced and unconvincing. The bonds between the characters, and more importantly the bonds between the characters and the audience, were not developed well enough to ever make these emotional outbursts very motivating. Perhaps it would have helped if the beginning of the movie had focused less on just telling us the back story and more on building the characters in the present, letting the audience become clued in to their history as the movie progressed.

The action scenes suffer from a similar problem. Some were good, but for the most part, they were uninteresting despite the over-the-top action. It seems that the creators were unable to make the action more subtly interesting, so they just made it bigger and wilder. Unfortunately, boring action made bigger is still boring action.

The comic style scene cuts were interesting but overdone. Not every scene needs a fancy cut. Eventually the strange cuts just became repetitive. It looked more like someone playing with new audio-video equipment than someone seriously making a movie. They should have focused on making excellent comic style cuts at key scenes instead of making mediocre attempts at it throughout the whole movie.

All in all, "The Hulk" is not a bad movie. It is, however, a movie that lacks subtlety and tries too hard to make up for it with quantity and extremity.