by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: August 05, 2008   Last Updated: December 31, 2010

A new Incredible Hulk film. Just a few years after Ang Lee's (unfairly) maligned Hulk, Edward Norton stars in a new production designed to put the Incredible back into the superhero that everyone privately thinks is a bit of a waste of time. And of course it's being feted as a bold new adaptation, when in fact it's a standard Marvel movie - right down to the obligatory cameo by Stan Lee.

So where Ang Lee turned the story of a scientist unleashing primal rage into some sort of modern Oedipal myth - complete with incredibly cool sections in comic book panels - this new version settles for a pedestrian tale with a huge number of massive action sequences.

Such as it is, the story runs that mild-mannered Bruce Bannen has subjected himself to a massive dose of gamma radiation that causes him to transform into a rampaging indestructible beast every time his blood pressure rises. This is, thankfully, shown in a brief credits sequence montage rather than the normal hour spent chronicling the origin of characters everyone knows already. He's hiding in Brazil and learning to control his temper. Whether this is supposed to be a sequel to the Ang Lee film or not is really unclear, but never mind.

Unfortunately for Bannen, the military haven't stopped searching for him, in an attempt to use his gamma mutation as a weapon of some sort (because an uncontrollable rampaging hulk is just what you want on a battlefield, clearly). Tim Roth is brought in as some sort of really hard mercenary guy - his character's British, continuing a long tradition of British villains in Hollywood, but his parents were Russian, making him so blatantly evil in film terms that surely someone should just shoot him at the earliest opportunity and save time.

And so it goes. Bannen's search for a cure for his condition is punctuated by lengthy chase sequences, and these tend to go on just a little bit too long. We can see that Bannen is trying to avoid becoming the Hulk at all costs, but this idea is stretched to just the wrong side of boring.

The search for a cure leads Bannen back to his ex, Betty, and then to a mysterious correspondent called 'Mr Blue'. The whole 'Mr Blue' thing is a bit of a damp squib. This shadowy figure is working with Bannen remotely throughout the first half of the film, setting up a fair amount of suspense about who he is, why he's helping and what he wants. Is he military? Is he Xavier out of X-Men? Is he, I don't know, interesting in some way? No, he's the token nerdy scientist,

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