The Incredible Hulk Review

The first act is better than its reputation. Leterrier opens in a Brazilian favela with Bruce Banner counting his heart rate on a wristwatch, learning breathing exercises, working a bottling line, and for twenty minutes this is a fugitive thriller with a body horror problem rather than a superhero film. Edward Norton plays exhaustion well, and Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky is the rare antagonist here with a coherent appetite, a soldier who wants the disease because the disease is strength.

Then the film has to deliver the monster, and the digital Hulk of 2008 is a rubbery green mass that never convincingly occupies the same space as the actors, so the climactic wrestle with the Abomination in Harlem plays as weightless cartoon violence at night. Liv Tyler is stranded in a role written as a destination. William Hurt gives Ross a useful flintiness the later films would eventually cash in. The deeper problem is that this is a reboot made too soon after a failure, apologizing for a version nobody asked it to answer for, and the franchise built around it recast its lead and moved on without a backward glance.