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, so why his identity is shrouded in any way whatsoever is utterly beyond me.
In terms of performances, the central players are all on good form. Edward Norton somehow seems to be taking all this nonsense seriously, Liv Tyler is still very attractive indeed and doesn't get enough film roles, William Hurt continues the Iron Man Jeff Bridges theme of wearing an enormous beard so no one can recognise him in this tosh, and Tim Roth is always worth watching, no matter how silly his character gets.
The scenes with the Hulk are all terrific fun, as well. Even though I always think of the green chap as everyone's fourth or maybe fifth favourite comic character, they're powerful scenes of devastating violence, which don't really pull any punches. With Tim Roth getting smacked around repeatedly as well, it drives home the point that this child's favourite is anything but cuddly. The special effects are, of course, amazing, although they don't really have an excuse to be anything less in this day and age. One of the main things that renders this new version pointless is the technical sophistication of the Ang Lee version. Probably this new CGI Hulk has a few more polygons than the previous one, but the bottom line is that we have seen this before.
Unlike Ang's Hulk, the X-Men films and even the recent Iron Man adaptation, there isn't much of an attempt to intellectualise The Incredible Hulk. It's a bit like Jekyll and Hyde only with more explosions. This simplification arguably works in the film's favour. It never attempts to be anything more than a big budget action blockbuster, and so on its own terms it succeeds admirably. The final battle between the Hulk and the Nasty Hulk that you've probably seen in the trailers begins absurdly and ends with the words 'Hulk Smash!'
However much you try and go with the flow, though, the dodgy seams of the writing begin to show through at the film's climax, when the crew realise they have to bring all this enjoyable tosh to some sort of reasonable conclusion. So a lengthy and apparently successful procedure to cure Bannen of his Hulkness is suddenly revealed not to have worked. People jump out of planes for no very good reason. We learn that you can extinguish flames by clapping REALLY HARD and displacing the air around the fire (this might well work for candles, but probably not for burning aviation fuel). American citizens will always cheer a superhero smackdown, even with huge chunks of masonry raining down into the streets.
In fact, the last fifteen minutes or so of the film is pretty much a rehash of the climax to Iron Man, which is ironic when you consider the very very last scene. Like Iron Man, there is a little Easter Egg at the end. Unlike Iron Man, they've put it before the end credits, so confused little urchins like me don't wander out without seeing it. This is a very good thing indeed, trust me on this.
In a summer of keenly anticipated superhero movies, Hulk will probably turn out to be the weakest of the bunch. It's just too cosy - even if you ignore the Stan Lee cameo, there's still that chap who played the monster in the TV series popping up for longer than necessary. There's about five too many jokes about purple trousers. The references to other comics become so prevalent that even a graphic novel dunce like myself can follow them. It's all jolly good fun, though, and definitely worth a look on a wet weekend.