Product Details

• Released on: 2008-12-16
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .18 pounds

Amazon.com
When the Hulk gets angry, his movie gets good, so you wish he'd get angry more often. Accepting this challenge after the triumphant Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Ang Lee has created an ambitious film, based on the Marvel comic created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, that succeeds as a cautionary tale about mad science and traumatized children coping with legacies of pain. That's the Hulk's problem: After accidental exposure to gamma radiation, scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) turns into the huge, green, and indestructible Hulk when provoked, and repressed childhood memories fuel his fury. Hobbled by the obligatory "origin story" (to acquaint neophytes with the character's Jekyll-and-Hyde-ish fate), there's room for little else in a sluggish film that struggles to reconcile Lee's stylistic flair (evident in his visual interpretation of comic-book technique) with the razzle-dazzle of a megabudget franchise. What's good is good (Jennifer Connelly essentially echoes her role from A Beautiful Mind, and Nick Nolte is righteously tormented as Banner's father), but the movie's schizoid intentions remain largely unclear. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
When angry, the scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) turns into a huge, rampaging monster. But then Bruce-all fifteen feet of him, green, grotesquely muscled, and mostly naked-approaches his lab colleague Betty, played by Jennifer Connelly, the mater dolorosa of the American cinema, and shrinks to his normal self. In brief, this beauty-and-the-beast movie is not a fable of mad passion, it's a fable of detumescence. The director Ang Lee and the writers James Schamus, John Turman, and Michael France can't seem to find the dramatic center of the material. They've made, of all things, a rather earnest and laborious picture about parent-child relationships: both Bruce and Betty struggle against their fathers. But without some sort of pop madness roiling around in the basement, a monster movie has very little reason to exist. Frederick Elmes's cinematography is entrancingly beautiful, but the computer-generated green giant is a dull, soulless beast, in comparison to whom King Kong is a veritable John Keats. Nick Nolte, as Bruce's mad-scientist father, has a couple of baffling rants about going beyond God and taking over the world-or something like that. With Sam Elliott as Jennifer Connelly's tough-as-nails military dad. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker