Hulk

When confronted with the flood of television and film productions, it's crucial to value every minute. A friend of mine advocates the theory that if a film doesn't catch his interest within five minutes, it's not worth watching. I broke this rule and gave Hulk a full thirty-five minutes, but it offered me little in return. It simply didn't engage me, perhaps except for the charm of young Jennifer Connelly, and that's too little. The start was too slow, and the overly psychological dialogues for a comic book story weren't my cup of tea. I can't judge the entire film, but from what I saw, I wouldn't give Hulk more than a 40% overall impression... (05/06/2007)

A family drama and a comic book story – do they even go together? Yes, if a capable director takes it on, which Ang Lee undoubtedly is. Ironically, I enjoyed the much criticized first "action lacking" half the most. Thanks to the imaginative direction, the clever editing and the interesting division of the image into multiple windows, I was not bored for a moment. My enthusiasm waned a bit during the botched scene with the mutated dogs, but the subsequent moments in the Nevada desert satisfied my libido again. The tank demolition scene in particular was awesome. During the lengthy dialogue between father and son at the end, boredom began to take over, but certainly not fucking boredom, as one unnamed critic stupidly wrote. Oh, and one more thing, Hulk’s purple shorts were really nasty :) (10/11/2003)

Hulk is fresh and innovative in its details, but it’s inconsistent as a whole. As the minutes pass, its large number of excellent (not just action) scenes and praiseworthy psychological dimension are transformed into a dramaturgically unbalanced and muddled mishmash. The second half of the film would need some relief from the “family drama” and to let the brilliant action and adventure go full throttle. Then it would have been a hell of a movie. The action scenes in the desert are outstanding. (07/08/2003)

Instead of proper psychology, we get a lot of verbal filler, and instead of exciting action, we only get digital ridiculousness in the desert. Ang Lee wanted to take the untrodden path, but he took a wrong turn with this film because it is simply impossible to carry a nearly two-and-a-half-hour colossus only with conversation. The formal games (editing, split-screen) get stereotypically boring after a while and don't suit the film at all. It's as if someone was adding their own psychedelic insertions to it in Lee’s editing room at night. The cast is excellent, and Elfman's ethnic-themed soundtrack is very nice, yet this whole farce still takes a downward turn given that the main villain doesn't show up until ten minutes before the end... in a comic book movie! Oops! (07/15/2007)

Ang Lee went about this cleverly, constructing his Hulk as a psychological spectacle rather than an "action eye candy comic book romp". You can feel the unconventional qualities and the attempt at resonance, which deserve credit at the very least for its audacity. Some of the flashbacks may come across as unnecessarily drawn out, but by the end I felt that everything fell into place well and I fully appreciated the rather dense psychological part of the story. But I have to be honest and say that I can't imagine a similar take on a comic book movie today – given the flood of over-stylized and extremely successful Marvel movies (which I also enjoy a lot, but in a different way), it seems almost impossible. (07/25/2018)