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The Hulk
PG-13
Playing at area theaters
Three reels out of four
For about three-quarters of The Hulk, it comes this close to being one of the best-ever film adaptations of a comic book. Director Ang Lee masterfully balances a Saturday-afternoon serial feel with drama.
Unfortunately, in the middle of the third act, the movie regresses into a 1950s-style sci-fi thriller, complete with a desert showdown between the monster and the Army.
The movie tells the tale of one Bruce Banner (Eric Bana), a brilliant geneticist with major intimacy issues. After being zapped by gamma rays during a lab accident, he undergoes an alarming change. Not only can he no longer suppress his anger, but now such feelings turn him into a gigantic, raging green creature. As if things aren’t bad enough, Bruce is confronted by demons from the past when the father he thought was dead suddenly resurfaces.
As the playwright Euripides wrote many years ago, "The sins of the father are visited upon the children." Such is the case with Banner and his father David (Nick Nolte). Years ago, David did something terrible when he was a scientist working for the Army. Bruce has kept it bottled up inside until now, but he senses that whatever is happening to him is a result of his father’s work.
To introduce such themes into a summer action movie about a big green monster can be a risky affair at best, a disaster at worst. In the able hands of Lee, this theme is explored to the utmost. With Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee showed he can make a film that entertaining on a commercial level but with an art-film sensibility. Here, he has made an action-packed blockbuster with the complexity and sensitivity of a serious drama about family. The movie works on most every level.
That is, until the jets start up. Then The Hulk undergoes a change not unlike its protagonist. Gone is the multi-layered entertainment and in its place we get what is basically an advertisement for the military. I half expected to see "Be all that you can be" over the screen. The guns blazing in the desert and the shots of Bruce/The Hulk’s forlorn love interest, Betty (Jennifer Connelly), recalled more than one science-on-the-rampage movie from the ’50s.
This is unfortunate because what comes before is one of the most imaginative, entertaining and thought-provoking movies I’ve seen all year.
The Hulk also contains perhaps Nolte’s best performance of a long and very interesting career. Looking very much like his much-publicized mug shots but with a beard, Nolte has an insane but intelligent energy that is hard to ignore.
The Hulk is hard to ignore as well. It may fizzle out toward the end, but boy, what a ride!
Gangs of New York
R
Available Tuesday
I finally saw the American Film Institute’s list of top 100 heroes and villains and I have one question: How did they miss Bill the Butcher, New York City’s very own Darth Vader circa 1863, as created by Daniel Day-Lewis? Without a doubt, Day-Lewis is the best reason for watching Martin Scorsese’s flawed but interesting film about the days leading up to that city’s infamous draft riots. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Amsterdam Vallone, a recent graduate of reform school who’s aching to avenge his father’s murder at the hands of you-know-who. Gangs has the dubious distinction of being only one of three films to be nominated for 10 or more Oscars without even one win. The Color Purple and The Turning Point are tied for first place with 11 each.
