The Incredible Hulk

The Incredible Hulk

Directed by Louis Leterrier

(PG-13)

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Marvel Comics’ Jekyll-and-Hyde saga is made into a movie, again.

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If your first attempt to create a superhero franchise doesn’t succeed, “try, try again,” said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. That’s what Marvel Comics has done with The Incredible Hulk. Five years after audiences rejected Ang Lee’s brooding, Freudian adaptation of the comic-book classic, the green monster is back for a makeover that’s more brawn than brains. Director Louis Leterrier and Edward Norton (as the Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner) team up for a version whose heart lies in its action sequences, “which are animated and genuinely impressive.” But the digital nature of this beast hurts the film, said David Ansen in Newsweek. When scrawny Norton transforms into the “gargantuan, muscle-bound, growling” Hulk, he becomes nothing but a special effect. “Peter Parker is Spider-Man, but Bruce Banner isn’t the Hulk,” so audiences feel less emotionally connected. Still, you “can’t keep a good monster down,” said Robert Wilonsky in The Village Voice. While Lee captured the character’s inner struggle, Letterier delivers the “outer kaboom,” and that makes his Hulk a better “superhero movie”—if not a better film.