Poodle Bites; Poodle Chews It - Page 2

Unlike the 70's era tv series, Lee and company retain most of the original comics' cast of characters: Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) gets his real first name back; Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) appears as our hero's love interest, while Betty's pop, General "Thunderbolt" Ross (Sam Elliot), is brought in to pursue our hero with all the requisite army artillery. Even relatively minor character Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas - sans the weaselly little mustache he sported in the comics) gets to pull secondary heavy duties. He gets a neat squirmy moment threatening the Hulk with a needle in the eye, which by itself is plenty of reason to justify his presence in this pic.

Where the movie makes its biggest revisionist moves is in our hero's origin and the addition of a new character: Bruce's father David (too bad Bill Bixby's dead - wouldn't it have been cool to see him in this role?), played by a seedy looking Nick Nolte. Bad Daddy David set the seeds of our hero's transformation by experimenting on himself back in the 60's (hey, it was an era for experimentation!) so that when Bruce was born, he already had a genetic predisposition toward Hulkishness. The lab accident - involving gamma rays and something called nanomeds - helps trigger what already was latent within our hero: an awfully convoluted explanation for an origin most of us mentally skip over, anyway. Feels like the kind of revisionist take some 3rd or 4th generation comics writer would concoct in a doomed attempt to repair three decades of continuity errors.

Nolte's something to see, though: muttering and ranting, he's a marked contrast to all the stiff-uppper-lippers who comprise the rest of the cast. You kind of get the sense the guy wandered onto the set from his last Sundance entry acting assignment - and didn't even bother to change his clothes. Too bad his lines are so dull.

When the monster finally shows, it's none too soon. Dennis Muran's CQI creation seems to go out of its way to look like it's not computer generated: at times, the Hulk has the herky-jerky movement of old stop motion animation. First big fight the green giant has is even framed like Willis O'Brian's King Kong. Set in a forest of towering trees, the fifteen-foot Hulk battles a trio of vicious mutant hounds (including - yeah, I know the breed is smart and can be a good hunter but still - a big poodle!) I totally forgot my tooth during that sequence.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

Visit Bill Sherman's author page — Bill Sherman's Blog