Hulk (2003)

 “Puny human!”

This is, incredibly, the first ever Hulk film... and it’s utterly, irredeemably awful. It’s a shame: the film is well-directed by Ang Lee with some nice visual touches. But it’s essentially a very, very, well-polished turd.

Part of why it's awful is the poor performance of Eric Bana as Bruce and Jennifer Connelly as Betty. Neither of them are exactly favourite actors of mine; they bring a touch of plywood to this as they do to most of what they do. Admittedly Sam Elliott does a good job with a badly written Thunderbolt Ross, while Nick Nolte is genuinely excellent as Bruce's dad, who also doubles as the Abomination.

But what truly dooms this film is the script, which completely fails to get what makes the Hulk interesting, as well as failing to give the characters and humanity or to give us decent dialogue; some of the lines are cringeworthy indeed. The whole concept is misconceived, drawing on the retconning of Bruce's childhood in the comics of the '80s and '90s under John Byrne and (much better) Peter David, beginning with his father's experiments with gamma radiation in the '60s and dealing with repressed childhood memories. Yet there's a reason this was a retcon; you need to start by just doing the gamma ray explosion and the fun Jekyll and Hyde "Hulk smash" stuff that the Hulk is about. All this childhood stuff needs us to know Bruce/Hulk first so we can start to explore the psyche behind those repressed memories- and make a link between the Hulk's rage and childhood abuse that the film doesn't really make.

Bruce and Betty have no real chemistry or, indeed, personalities, and Betty seems to be there mainly to act as the Faye Wray to the Hulk's King Kong. This may be a film with lots of genuinely cool action set pieces but it has no charm, no characters and is just dull, dull, dull.