ang lee

Quick Takes: New Orleans Rep Scene Report

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I’ve hit a dry spell with new releases lately.  Now that last year’s Awards Season holdovers and January’s Dumping Season genre trash have fallen off local marquees, there just isn’t that much out there for me.  I’d be in much better shape if I kept up with the annual sequels to ongoing franchises like Shazam, Creed, and John Wick, but I resent the idea that I need to do prerequisite homework before going to the movies, so I’m okay just letting them pass me by.  During this ritualistic dry spell that crops up before “Summer Blockbuster” season gets rolling mid-Spring, I find myself thinking a lot about cities like Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Chicago, and Toronto that aren’t nearly as reliant on the new release calendar for their moviegoing options.  These are cities with robust, flourishing repertory scenes where audiences seemingly get to see an older “new-to-you” title projected on the big screen every day of the week.  The New Orleans rep scene is much smaller & more scattered, to the point where it isn’t actually an organized scene at all.  You have to scrounge local listings on a weekly basis to find a couple disparate repertory titles worth getting excited about, something I become sharply aware of every time the new release calendar gets this consistently dull.  New Orleans rep screenings are out there, though, and they are easily accessible if you know where to look.

So, here are a few quick short-form reviews of the repertory screenings I happened to catch around the city over the past month, along with notes on where I found them.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

You can find the usual suspects of broad-appeal crowdpleaser rep screenings on a near-monthly basis—namely, Rocky Horror & The Room—but for the really good stuff you have to wait for annual festivals.  For instance, the upcoming Overlook Film Festival is about to bring legacy screenings of titles like Joe Dante’s Matinee, William Castle’s The Tingler, and David Cronenberg’s Dead Zone to both locations of The Prytania for one killer rep-friendly weekend we won’t see again until next Overlook.  This is happening less than a month after the most recent New Orleans French Film Festival (also staged at The Prytania) included Agnès Varda’s French New Wave classic Cléo from 5 to 7 in collaboration with the host venue’s weekly Classic Movie series.  That was also no fluke.  In the past, I’ve gotten to see French classics like Breathless, Children of the Paradise, Beauty and the Beast, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Mr. Klein, and The Nun for the first time on the big screen thanks to French Film Fest, when I’d usually have to seek that kind of artsy-fartsy fare on the Criterion Channel at home.  I’ve particularly become spoiled when it comes to Varda’s work, of which I’ve seen most of her titles that I’m familiar with (including personal favorites The Gleaners & I and Le Bonheur) for the first time at that exact venue.  In all honesty, I should have sought out Cléo from 5 to 7 a lot sooner, as it’s arguably her most iconic work, but I was convinced it would eventually play at the festival if I was patient enough . . . and the gamble paid off.

The titular Cleopatra is a young chanteuse enjoying mild notoriety for her yé-yé pop tunes in early-60s Paris.  She’s also a superstitious, narcissistic hypochondriac who’s awaiting potentially devastating news from a doctor who recently screened her for cancer.  The movie follows Cléo’s attempts to distract herself for the final two hours before those test results arrive, explaining through an observational character study how, in her mind, the anticipation is far worse than any news her doctor could deliver.  Incidentally, the film also doubles as a real-time tour of 1960s Paris, as Varda’s handheld, ground-level camera commits brazen acts of people-watching while Cléo cabs & busses from cafe to art studio to couturier.  As Cléo muses about how modeling new clothes is intoxicating and her free-spirit bestie muses the same about nude modeling for art students, that cinematic voyeurism becomes the main thematic thrust of the picture.  The camera casually observes the people of Paris.  The people of Paris intensely observe the fashionable Cléo, who in turn even more intensely observes her own reflection.  Even though not much actually happens in the film, I was thrilled by how much of its screen space was overwhelmed by reflections in mirrors & windowpanes.  Not only did those reflections underline its themes of self-obsession & strange gazes, but it also just looked cool, affording Varda even more room to chop up & alter her images from infinite angles. And just as I was putting that thought together, the movie “overhears” a café discussion of Cubism as an artform.  As always with these Varda screenings at French Film Fest, Cléo was an immensely rewarding trip to the theater, one that made me fondly remember its newfound superiority over Breathless in the most recent Sight & Sound rankings.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Besides sporadic festival offerings, the most obvious, consistent venues for rep screenings are the only venues where you can watch any movies in New Orleans proper: The Broad and The Prytania, which among them account for the only three full-time cinemas within city limits.  Luckily, they’re both well balanced & adventurous in their programming, squeezing in as a many freak-show arthouse screenings as they can between the Top Gun & Avatar behemoths that pay the bills.  Since they recently acquired the Canal Place venue, The Prytania has had more screens to play with than The Broad, so they have more room for regular repertory programming like their aforementioned Classic Movie series and their weirder, wilder Wildwood series on Thursday nights.  I check both theatres’ listings every Tuesday afternoon to survey the next week of showtimes, though, and they’ve both come through with plenty of great repertory screenings in recent months – from new-to-me genre relics like Ghost in the Shell & Calvaire to very strange, one-of-a-kind presentations of The Mothman Prophecies and Antonioni’s Blow-Up.  Even though their rep offerings are less frequent, The Broad accounts for about half of the screenings I actually make it to (not least of all because they’re a much shorter bus ride away from my house), and I very much appreciate that they make room for older titles on the few screens they have to play with.  In particular, they’ve been on a John Carpenter kick lately, screening 4K restorations of his genre-defining classics that happened to get past me in my video store youth, which is how I recently got to see both The Fog and Assault on Precinct 13 for the first time on the big screen.

I would never place a Western-inspired prison siege movie above Carpenter’s supernatural horror classics as the director’s absolute best, but Assault on Precinct 13 does have a strong case as Carpenter’s absolute coolest.  Set in the vaguely defined war zone of “a Los Angeles ghetto”, this punk-era cops vs. gangsters shootout recalls much later, grimier genre pictures like Tenement, The Warriors, and Streets of Fire than it does the gruff, traditionalist John Wayne heroics that inspired it.  That said, Darwin Joston is doing a straight-up John Wayne impersonation as the laidback Death Row inmate Napoleon Wilson, who’s temporarily set free by his jailers to fire back at the ghoulish gangsters who relentlessly invade the titular police station where he is held captive.  His uneasy, sardonic friendship & romance with the officers he fights beside make Precinct a kind of unlikely hangout film in the tradition of the similarly violent-but-laidback Rio Bravo.  It’s Carpenter’s overbearing directorial style that makes it a classic in its own right, though, especially in the way he portrays the invading gangsters as no less mysterious & otherworldly than the ghosts that emerge from The Fog.  His halfway-closed police station setting is an eerie liminal space, and the morality of who’s in “the right” in the plot’s pigs vs. civilians warfare is just as unsettled.  I’ve gotten to see a lot of John Carpenter classics for the first time theatrically (including his actual career-best, The Thing, at The Prytania), and two things are always consistent among those screenings: his signature synth scores are electrifying in that full surround-sound environment, and no matter how great the movies are I always struggle to stay awake for their entirety.  In a perfect world, I’d love for the city’s somewhat regular John Carpenter rep screenings to play as matinees instead of cult-classic Midnighters, but as is I’ve gotten used to seeing them in my own liminal halfway dream state, re-running key scenes on Tubi as soon as I get home to make sure I didn’t actually sleep through something vital.  Given its real-world setting & premise, I didn’t expect Assault on Precinct 13 to fit so well into that eerie supernatural mold, but that’s apparently the John Carpenter touch.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

When things get really desperate, you can always leave the city for the suburbs, where there are multiple AMC Theaters waiting to dazzle you with “$5 Fan Favorite” rep screenings of crowd-pleasers like E.T., Jurassic Park, The Goonies and, presumably, even a few movies not produced by Steven Spielberg.  I happened to catch AMC at an opportune moment in recent weeks, when the Awards Season afterglow of the Oscars allowed for more variety on their schedule than usual.  In particular, AMC Elmwood included Ang Lee’s international wuxia hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on its recent Fan Favorites schedule, presumably inspired by Michele Yeoh’s Oscars Moment as the lead of the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once.  Movies like Crouching Tiger returning to the big screen for their victory laps (or, often enough, getting funded in the first place) are the major reason I consider the exhausting Oscars ritual an overall net good. They’re more of a useful marketing tool than they are a signifier of artistic quality, but they are useful.  Until now, I’ve only ever experienced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as an on-the-couch Blockbuster VHS rental, and it was wonderful to see its fantastic fight choreography play out on a larger canvas for the first time.

To my taste, the classy, buttoned-up version of martial arts cinema in Crouching Tiger is not nearly as exciting as the more playful, over-the-top actioners Michele Yeoh was making in her Hong Kong heyday.  Since The Heroic Trio is unlikely to ever make its way back to the suburban multiplex, however (despite a recent co-sign from The Criterion Collection, an actual signifier of good taste), I was ecstatic to watch Yeoh clang swords & hop rooftops in this Oscars-certified historical drama.  I can’t say that the will-they-won’t-they love story Yeoh shares with Chow Yun-Fat ever landed much emotional impact with me in the few times I’ve seen this film, nor do I pay much attention to the quiet nobility of their mission to find a rightful home for a 400-year-old sword.  I’m the kind of dipshit who prefers Pearl Chang’s low-rent, goofball version of wuxia acrobatics to the headier, classier oeuvre of King Hu, though, so it’s probably best that my personal taste is not dictating what gets screened around the city.  At its best, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a visual spectacle about the beauty of tactile fight choreography and wire work, and no matter how restrained the drama is between those fights (nor how mundane a theatrical venue the AMC can be), it’s impossible to deny the power of seeing those images big & loud for the first time.

-Brandon Ledet

Gemini Man (2019)

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After earning major critical accolades as the director of cinematic triumphs like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, one-time filmmaker Ang Lee is now considering a secondary career as an absolute madman. Ever since Life of Pi, Lee has been sinking further & further into the abyss of tech obsession in his maniacal, one-sided pursuit of Perfection in craft – periodically emerging from his haunted laboratory with feature “films” no one wants nor cares for: first Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk in 2016 and now 2019’s Gemini Man. Specifically, Lee has become fixated on the merits of ultra-motion-smoothing High Frame Rate tech usually reserved for video games and sports broadcasts. Scoffing at the cowardly 48fps & 60fps rates that make the Hobbit movies and your parents’ factory-setting TVs look like absolute dogshit, Lee has bravely shouted “Double it!” in the face of God & good taste. Not a single commercial movie theater in America is currently equipped to screen Gemini Man in its intended, diabolical format: 3D, 4k, 120fps. Fourteen theaters in the country did secure a version of the film in that roided-out motion-smoothing 120fps rate, though, settling for a wimpy 2k 3D scan so their equipment could handle the projection. One of them happened to be AMC Elmwood just outside New Orleans, which is one of my weekly movie-watching spots.

Gemini Man’s light sci-fi plot about a retired super-soldier who must defend his decades-younger clone—both played by Will Smith—is about as generic of an action blockbuster premise that you’ll find outside a 1990s Bruckheimer flick. It’s probably for the best that this killer clones story template is something we’ve already seen repeated too many times before, though, since there isn’t a single second of this monstrous HFR experiment when you aren’t thinking about how absolutely fucking bizarre everything looks, so there’s no real room to care about the story. Will Smith acts his heart out in his dual roles, selling both the unembarrassed cheese of his older self’s Dad Jokes and the deep pain of the younger clone’s identity crisis with full commitment as the two super-soldiers battle it out in a “hyper real” screen space. There’s nothing Smith can to distract from the visual spectacle of the film’s format, though, since that’s where all of Lee’s efforts were poured. Applying all this HFR and mo-cap clone tech to such a pedestrian nothing of a story is a bold, deliberate choice on Lee’s part; it makes the movie about the technology as if it were a convention-floor demo reel. There’s nothing Smith can do with the so-so dialogue that will overpower the spectacle of him drinking from a crisply detailed soda can or swatting a distinctly visible fly with his baseball cap. There’s no semblance of depth in the film’s screenplay, but there’s miles-long depth of field in Lee’s camera; the distance between those two effects continually calls attention to itself to the point where there’s room for nothing else.

Overall, I’m more tickled with Ang Lee’s madman passion for tech no one else cares for than I am pleased with the results. It’s confounding to me that the very week this film was released there was a Twitter hive-mind discussion about the difference between cinema and theme parks—sparked by Martin Scorsese flippantly dismissing the artistic merits of the MCU—and somehow this wasn’t the movie being discussed. Usually, in action movies there’s a level of forget-your-troubles escapism in the stunts & explosions on display, but those payoffs here look more akin to attending a live practical effects demonstration at a Universal Studios amusement park than they do cinema. Every spark, flame, bullet, and speck of shrapnel on the screen was distinctly visible and textured in detail, but the HFR motion-smoothing often cheapened the look of the action so that it resembled a behind-the-scenes featurette instead of the Feature Presentation. The most delight I found in the results of Lee’s experiment were the kind of gimmick demonstrations that were popular the first time 3D tech was imported into movie theaters: gun barrels, motorcycles, explosions, and—I kid you not—kernels of popcorn protruding past the 2D plane to “leap” off the screen. Gemini Man might have worked better as a Movie if it were nonstop stunts & chases in that way, with an assortment of 3D objects constantly flying at the screen in unrelenting Will-Smith-on-Will-Smith mayhem, but making a better movie was never Ang Lee’s goal. It was just as important to the madman that he exhibit what the HFR tech can do in dramatic, low-key moments of (consistently non-consequential) dialogue – the kind of attraction you’d find at a techie convention, or inside a carnival tent.

There are flashes of interesting images that result from Gemini Man’s formal experiment, most notably in the super-soldier’s underwater nightmares and, appropriately, the 1st-person-shooter video game action sequences. Mostly, though, this feels like an accomplished director who got bored with making movies reaching for an unattainable goal with equipment & an audience that aren’t quite there yet. At one point, a character describing a failed military mission explains it perfectly, saying “It’s like watching the Hindenburg crash into the Titanic.” You have to appreciate the hubris that leads to that kind of spectacle, even when the results are this disastrous. I do believe that some near-future nature documentary or surreal animation experiment will make better use of this tech, and that success will be largely due to Ang Lee’s willingness to fail in such a spectacular fashion. He’s wearing himself out to the point of madness trying to normalize something no one else seems to want. The weird thing is that it might already be working, however subtly. My opening-night audience didn’t seem to notice anything peculiar about the film’s presentation, to the point where I felt like running around the theater shouting “Don’t y’all see how fucking weird this all is???” Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Either way, they didn’t seem to care – which is the exact indifference that is snapping Ang Lee’s brain in half, like so many duplicated Will Smiths.

-Brandon Ledet

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: The Incredible Hulk (2008)

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & has thus far seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: In our previous installment, we talked about how Marvel managed to keep itself afloat in dark financial times by licensing its properties to other companies across different media platforms, which led to many Marvel characters being distributed to different film studios. This was a move that saved the company while causing other issues down the line, but even when playing from a disadvantage, Marvel’s lawyers knew how to build in failsafes. After the mixed box office reception to Ang Lee’s meditative but pretentious and reviled 2003 film Hulk, Universal Pictures failed to produce a sequel within the appropriate timeframe required to retain the rights to the character (which, as you may recall from Brandon’s Fantastic Four review, was the reason Roger Corman’s notorious FF film exists). The rights to the character reverted to Marvel, with Universal merely distributing. Writer Zak Penn, who had written a previous Hulk treatment script ten years before, was brought on to write the first draft of the script for The Incredible Hulk, which was initially planned as a sequel to Ang Lee’s film. The 2006 and 2007 trade papers referred to the film as such and stated that the character of Bruce Banner had been recast with Ed Norton, while heavily implying that everyone else would reprise their roles. The script Penn turned in was designed to begin welding together the larger interfilm universe, which means it was very nearly the case that the Lee Hulk was technically the first MCU film.

Ultimately, this bullet was dodged when Marvel eschewed the sequel nature of the project and instead chose to treat this as the MCU’s introduction to the Hulk. There are still some parts of the final draft that are obviously left over from earlier versions (General Ross at one point states, for instance, that Banner has been on the run for five years—the same length of time between the Lee film and this one). Gone are the melodramatic contemplations of Lee’s film; gone too are most of the elements of the Hulk’s origins, replaced with a montage sequence played over the opening credits that encapsulates how Banner and the Hulk came to exist and borrowing extensively from the imagery of the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series.

Norton himself performed an overhaul on the script, and the reportage and history of what happened next are contentious. Some articles printed at the time seemed to state that Norton had edited the script with the studio’s blessing, and he claimed to have edited it so extensively as to deserve a writing credit. To this day it’s not entirely clear why he went this far (although the potential to collect royalties as both an actor and a writer certainly makes it worth an attempt), but there was hostility behind the scenes, with Penn upset that Norton was claiming he “wrote” the script and the WGA having to get involved, ultimately siding with Penn. Although Norton isn’t named for this contribution in the film’s actual credit reel, the publicity surrounding the issue made it a moot point, and the fact that Marvel had recast the Hulk yet again by his next appearance in 2011 does strongly imply that Norton might have been considered a problem, even forgetting that he already has a reputation for being difficult to work with. Still, the new and improved Incredible Hulk was well-received in its day, with most criticism comparing it to the previous film and praising its improvements. But, would and can it be appreciated now, as a film so distanced from the failures of its predecessor that it can’t simply be judged as being better than it? Can it be enjoyed as a solo film, divorced from its context for fans of the MCU and Marvel Comics in general?

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twostar

Brandon: Okay, I have so many questions about just what in the living fuck is going on in Not-Ang-Lee’s Hulk movie, but I guess the most pressing one is about the film’s quality. Is it a hot mess, a hopelessly mediocre bore, or a mixed bag floating somewhere between either extreme? Is it possible that it could be all three?

Even having just watched The Incredible Hulk for the first time, I have no idea where to land on a solid assessment, which isn’t a good sign in terms of the film’s overall quality. It’s at least pretty easy to point out what doesn’t work here. The casting is all wrong, first off.  Any “Hey that’s not Ed Norton!” awkwardness that must’ve cropped up when Hulk reappeared in the first Avengers film was well worth the transition into Mark Ruffalo’s reign as the Angry Green Giant. Norton is far from the only miscast role (any movie where Liv Tyler is more than a supporting player raises an instant red flag for me), but because he plays the titular beast, his presence is a huge drag on the film. I genuinely enjoy Norton as an actor & he’s engaging enough in Bruce Banner form, but his CGI Hulk incarnation feels entirely removed, like it couldn’t possibly be the same person as Banner. That’s not an effect you want in a Dr. Jekyll/Mr Hyde situation. Another easily recognizable flaw is the film’s CGI itself, which is so excessive, empty, and flat that I can’t believe the Marvel folks (successfully) gambled to bring the character back in The Avengers. And that’s not even to mention some leftover late 90s/early 00s visual cheese (including a Matrix-like view into the Internet) that could’ve been lifted from such shitfests as Swordfish or XXX or, hell, the also seemingly-outdated Iron Man from the very same year. At some point the MCU became the cutting edge in superhero cinema (especially considering how the still on-going, seemingly endless parade of grim Dark Knight knockoffs choose to dwell in the past) but in 2008 it felt at least five years behind the times.

But, you know what? Complaining about comic book movies on the Internet is such a cliché at this point that I fell the urge at this point to mention that 2008’s The Incredible Hulk is far from a total wash. At the very least I appreciated that it sidestepped a by-the-numbers origin story narrative (perhaps in an attempt to learn from Ang Lee’s mistakes) & relegated Bruce Banner’s “gamma poisoning” past to a quick Hulk Cam montage during the opening credits. The movie also seemed to be well aware of how flat & false its CGI looked, making conscious efforts to hide its Hulking Out transformations in the shadows, the way an old school monster movie would. There are also some spare weird ideas here or there that make the journey almost-worthwhile (the blood gallery, a blood-contaminated bottle of not-Surge, and Tim Roth’s rival Hulk monstrosity Abomination come to mind), as well as some decent, humorous irreverence, like when Banner poorly translates his infamous catchphrase to “You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry.” I’d be a total liar, though, if I didn’t admit that my favorite moment of the whole film was Lou Ferrigno’s featured cameo as a nameless security guard. It’s a sublimely silly moment in a movie that could’ve used more of them. My picture of the writer’s room for The Incredible Hulk is Michael Bluth urging his son George Michael to “keep your head down & power through.” For all of its occasional virtues, the film often feels hopelessly dutiful, necessary to further the MCU narrative, but never establishing its own individual purpose.

In the end, I get the sense that The Incredible Hulk is a mostly forgettable entry on the MCU landscape. Mark Ruffalo’s re-casting of the role was honestly a godsend for the franchise. Norton is a gifted actor, but he was entirely wrong for the role, a feeling that’s only reaffirmed by my giddiness over seeing Lou Ferrigno’s appearance, since Ferrigno is The Hulk. Still, the film’s not quite bad enough to be outright hate-worthy like the dad rock soundtracked, wealthy D-bag fantasy fulfilment of Iron Man. If nothing else,  The Incredible Hulk is a difficult film to pin down. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t fully dismiss it.

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three star

Boomer: I hadn’t seen The Incredible Hulk since it first came to DVD over half a decade ago. During the intermittent times that I happened to have cable, FX never had quite the hard-on for re-running this film that it did for the first two Iron Man flicks and, about a year ago, Captain America and Thor, although I do remember a time when it felt like the Lee Hulk aired at least twice a week. As a result, I have more memories of watching that picture than this one. The 2003 film is in many ways a very flawed enterprise, although within the past year the internet at large has noted that it might be worth reappraisal; I’m not sure that I agree, as the film is almost inarguably a failure, but I also appreciate that the things that it attempted and failed at were weighty and introspective. It stands out because it tried to be an exploration of too many ideas: mad science experimentation, the lingering traumas of child abuse, military dominance, the interconnectedness and fragility of the ecosystem, and the duality of how two lovers exist within their relationships to and with their respective fathers, to name a few. Then, Lee paired those concepts with bizarre cinematic experiments like transitions and multi-angle shots inspired by the paneled nature of the comics page. It’s an attempt to fuse a superhero narrative with art film composition, but the demands of those two disparate approaches to film as a medium ended up making a muddled mess of ideas.

So, of course Incredible Hulk was more well-liked, although its concepts are smaller in their successes than Hulk was in its failures. Even at the time, it was noteworthy for its starpower, the one-two punch of Norton and Robert Downey Jr. both appearing in superhero movies in the same year going a long way to legitimize the growing MCU and the exponential growth of comic adaptations as a genre, paving the way for a decade that has seen both The Walking Dead and Jonah Hex brought to life. Of course, getting the star of such award-attracting fare as American History X and The 25th Hour was a good idea—that backfired on both sides of the camera. Norton intentionally plays up Banner’s social awkwardness and makes him seem like much more of a weirdo, imbuing the character with a lot of traits that make the performance seem overthought and out of place rather than organic. On the one hand, I want to praise the film for not attempting to play up Norton’s Banner as a hunky scientist and instead treat him as the kind of average-looking, highly-intelligent guy who spent most of his adolescence and adulthood in a lab. On the other hand, the film still expects us to buy that this kinda nerdy biologist had an intensely loving and powerful relationship with Betty Ross. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that I have difficulty accepting that Betty and Bruce would fall in love with each other, or that there’s anything unbelievable about them having had a relationship. I’m merely saying that I have a hard time buying that the relationship between them could be so sweeping, with him having a passion for her that fuels his desire to find a cure, even after five years with no contact.

This isn’t helped by the fact that Norton and Liv Tyler have no real chemistry either. The under-baked Betty as she existed on paper would seem incompletely conceptualized even if she weren’t acting as a foil for Norton’s overwrought Banner character, seeing as so much of her role is to be observed through a gauzy lens while in the path of destruction and let her hair blow in the wind. There’s a dissonance in the way that she and Norton approach the material and that gives neither anything to play off of in their intimate scenes; if they don’t seem to be passionate about one another, it’s difficult to accept that Betty would just leave the new relationship that she’s in and take back up with Banner as soon as he reappears after such a long period of time with no interaction. It would have been a more interesting narrative choice if she and Bruce had reunited and she had moved on in the meantime, but she still loved him enough to help him seek a cure. As a plot element, this would also leave Bruce emotionally compromised in a way that paved the way for the Hulk to emerge. Instead, she completely leaves behind all of her responsibilities, including a boyfriend she seems to be living with, to go on the run with Bruce.

It’s not that Tyler’s a bad actress (necessarily), but Betty is barely a character in this movie, existing solely to motivate the two men in her life: Banner, and her father, General “Thunderbolt” Ross. William Hurt turns in a slightly hammy performance as Ross, cartoonish in the way that a lot of notable actors were when appearing in genre pictures of the Aughts before they became the new normal. His obsession with revisiting the (arguable) success of creating the Hulk demonstrates such an intense lack of foresight that he’s impossible to empathize with, when he would be better served by a more nuanced approach. Tim Roth’s character takes this even further, and his generic compulsion to become More! Powerful! makes him one of the more unmemorable villains of the genre (although he’s not as bad as what’s coming next time).

Overall, even though this is a more objectively successful film than the much-maligned Lee Hulk, it’s also a more mainstream and flat one. It does not follow as a matter of course that a film becomes more emotionally compelling or better art simply because its narrative holds together better than another. Virtually every actor in the film feels miscast, and the film as a whole doesn’t demand or reward investment, which I felt that even Iron Man managed to accomplish. Despite the fact that it leaves the door open for several ideas to recur in the MCU, like Abomination, Tim Blake Nelson’s character (i.e., the future Leader), and Betty, none of these threads has been followed up on, so I give this one a solid “skip,” unless your appetite for metropolitan destruction is still going strong after destruction porn like 2012 and Man of Steel. It’s a fine movie, it’s just not necessarily worth your time.

Lagniappe

Boomer: I understand why Banner isn’t a developer of a gamma-based weapon in most of the adaptations; not only would that make it more difficult to empathize with him, we’ve already got a weapons designer who’s hard to like in the form of Tony Stark. Still, it is weird that no adaptation of the Hulk to date has used his actual origin story, at least to my knowledge. It’s like if every non-comic incarnation of Superman had his ship landing in a farm in Nebraska instead of Kansas; it’s not different enough to elicit fanboy anger, but it is unusual. Additionally, were it not for the fact that Hurt is set to reprise his role as General Ross in Captain America: Civil War (he can be seen in the trailer), this film could be almost complete dismissed from the MCU. Abomination and the Leader actually could be interesting foes to appear down the line, but it seems unlikely that Kevin Feige and company will drag them out of the mothballs after over seven years. The weirdest thing is that Betty has been virtually excised from the MCU as a whole, what with her never reappearing, Banner being recast, and Age of Ultron establishing a romantic relationship between Banner and Black Widow. I’m not really all that sad to see her go (sorry Liv, but I’m Team Jennifer Connelly for life), but it is worth remarking upon. As Civil War does look like it’s set to address the way in which costumed heroes/vigilantes are responsible for mass destruction, it’ll be interesting to see if Abomination’s path of destruction in New York will be referenced (it hasn’t been at all in either Daredevil or Jessica Jones), especially given that the responsibility for that damage falls on General Ross more than anyone else.

Brandon: Ugh, America’s favorite D-bag billionaire Tony Stark drops by in The Incredible Hulk‘s final scene to promise a crossover that ain’t coming for four more features. I’m hoping at some point I’ll warm up to MCU’s interplay between its individual properties, but so far it doesn’t amount to much more than Downey’s Stark or Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury ominously hinting at future payoffs in films where they don’t belong. Surely, there’s a way to incorporate these characters in each other’s universes besides arbitrary cameos with no in-the-moment narrative consequence, but I’m just not seeing it yet.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for The Incredible Hulk (2008)

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twohalfstar

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.