The Incredible Hulk

I don't have many kind things to say about this movie, so we'll get this out of the way early. As I've said before, Craig Armstrong's orchestral score is okay. It's never actively unpleasant to listen to, and is well orchestrated if not particularly entertaining. I also rather liked the visual take this movie had on the Hulk himself. Not while he's moving, heavens no. Just, stationary. As a still, this version of the Hulk looks all right.


Also, uh...

Nope, that's it. Craig Armstrong and one probably under-appreciated concept artist are the two redeeming features of this film. Shall we talk about the rest now?

This is, in my opinion, the one movie in the MCU that absolutely fell flat on its face. Even the second worst movie in the MCU is a hundred country miles better than this one. There are a lot of reasons for that, but among them you'll find problems with the script, the effects, the fight choreography, the acting, the plot, the cinematography, the location scouting... pretty much anything that could go wrong, did. Is this the worst movie of all time? No. There are many movies that do each of those things much worse. But this movie, while maybe not as specifically horrible as those, has the bizarre distinction of being comprehensively bad, meaning it is at best mediocre by essentially every metric.

The most specifically obnoxious thing I re-notice every time I watch this movie is the woodenness of the acting. I've got it on pretty good authority (read: other movies I've seen) that most of the actors in this movie can, you know, act. At the very least they can deliver lines in a way that doesn't make me feel as if they've been replaced by a smartphone assistant. But somewhere in this production, be it the writing, the direction, or maybe just bad decisions in post-production editing, we wound up with performers who could be replaced by mannequins for all the expression diversity we get. The best acted moment? Right at the very, very end, when Banner grins at the camera. There are actual character questions raised by that moment, based on nothing but a smile. But instead of starting the movie there and unpacking those questions, they started it two hours earlier and ended before it got interesting.

There are also a sort of embarrassing number of callbacks to the last Hulk movie, Ang Lee's campy comic-influence-heavy version with a legit green hulk and actual purple pants. I don't say "embarrassing" in this case because Ang Lee's Hulk wasn't deserving of the jabs. I say "embarrassing" because every one of those jabs is delivered like it was actually painful for the actors giving the delivery. Maybe it felt too overt to them. Maybe they were added during reshoots in an effort to inject humor into the film and everyone was just sick of the whole production at that point. Maybe the writers were literally digging shivs into their backs to force them to deliver the lines. Whatever the case, it's the pot calling the kettle hungry (because you won't like it when it's hungry), and instead of being funny it actually just makes everything worse.

And maybe the worst thing about this movie is how fast the story is willing to drop plot threads and chuck logic or "character motivations" right out the window. Random science-guy is somehow cloning Banner's blood. Uh... how? Why? Oh, he built an entire machine to cure gamma-irradiation in his lab? Did he buy a whole dialysis machine based on a hunch that Banner was going to show up someday and not die horribly first? That guy also gets his head smashed against something, which causes swelling that I'm sure would be fatal. He then smiles, and what the heck was that? Setup for a sequel? That's cute.

There's also the General, who has alienated his daughter hardcore (what ever happened with her significant other, BTW? Did she go back to him? Was he okay with that?) and shot up a university campus in broad daylight before crashing a helicopter into a super-monster fight he caused that destroyed several city blocks worth of New York City. Does he, uh, still have a job after that? Like, I kinda feel like he should be in federal prison. Movie? A clue, please?

Speaking of the giant monster fight, the Hulk just walks away from that, I guess. Not like they could stop him if they tried. Guess who else they couldn't stop if they tried? That other giant monster that has the exact same strength as the Hulk. What the heck did they do with that guy? Handcuffs and a very large police truck? Sent him to prison? Did he not recover from that fight within like 30 minutes and go chasing after the Hulk again? How? Why? Did they at least notify his next of kin that he was dead, or something? Did the writers even remember that he was in the movie?

In short, the movie was bland and characterless, which means that every plot hole and wooden delivery stick out, hard, even during a first viewing. Is it objectively the worst movie ever? Not by a long shot. It's not quite The Final Frontier bad, for instance. But it also lacks any of The Final Frontier's redeeming qualities, so as a whole my personal viewing experience may actually be worse. To my mind The Incredible Hulk is by far the worst movie in the MCU, and every time I watch it I can't help but think that someone would have to screw up a lot of things in order to beat that dubious record.

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