Hulk Reviews
Top Critic
Nice as it would be to report that Ang and his co-writer/producer James Schamus had regenerated the summer blockbuster, we gotta poop the party.
An interesting effort to give one of the staples of mass entertainment something extra in the way of insight and feeling.
Big, dopey and crammed with special effects that take the breath away.
Despite the profusion of computer-generated effects, which rousingly bring the green guy to life, I often felt, for better and for worse, that I was watching a comic-book movie reconceived as a piece of serious mythmaking.
Unlike your average comic-book blockbuster, The Hulk isn't a bad cartoon. It's a bad modern Greek tragedy.
Are comic books art? Maybe, but this leaden, pretentious flick about Marvel Comics' big green id, from the overrated Ang Lee, is just schlock art for the NPR set.
Lee tries to spruce it all up with heavy use of split-screen, which is sometimes clever and sometimes distracting. But nothing can distract us from the overriding reality that too much of Hulk is a sulk.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A comic book movie as smart and expressive as the medium that spawned it.
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| Original Score: 4/5
An arty-farty super-hero flick.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A thinking person's movie with precious little for anyone to think about, except for a green giant smashing things.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This movie is every bit as spiritual and arty as Lee's last film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, just as dark as that film but a good deal less buoyant.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A fascinating, if flawed, extravaganza.
| Original Score: 3/5
This green-eyed monster may be the perfect symbol of an angry time. But he's an impossible hero to cheer.
This messy, disappointing, self-important and utterly humorless version of the Marvel comic book character may be the toughest flick with a green protagonist to sit through since The Grinch.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The filmmakers said it was going to be smart -- really smart -- like all of Lee's movies. Instead, it's big, dumb and fun.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
For all its stylistic energy, The Hulk remains curiously flat and uninvolving whenever the monster is offscreen.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Hulk may not jump as high as some had hoped, but it still packs a solid wallop.
| Original Score: B
Hulk is hardly a masterpiece. But it is certainly one of the most psychologically ambitious movies ever unleashed on the summer-movie crowd.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Schamus and his fellow screenwriters have taken the most pompous elements of superhero comics -- the humorless archetypes, the italicized declamations -- and inflated them until they nearly burst with the strain.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The Hulk is a seriously repressed movie, and like its hero-victim, Bruce Banner, it doesn't know what it wants to be: serious and thoughtful, or big green money-making machine.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Ang has the arty smarts, Stan has the pop wiles -- now if only they could get on the same page.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
I can't say that The Hulk is my favorite comic-book movie or that it moved me, but I admired Lee's inventiveness, even when his movie wasn't as much fun as I expected it to be.
| Original Score: B
Ang Lee has boldly taken the broad outlines of a comic book story and transformed them to his own purposes; this is a comic book movie for people who wouldn't be caught dead at a comic book movie.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A terrific, great-looking movie that's rich and memorable and almost as huge as its mighty green star.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
A dark and serious psychological drama cum sci-fi spectacle, The Hulk is incredible for what it attempts rather than what it achieves. For some viewers, that will be enough.
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| Original Score: C+
Lee's talents, though vast and subtle, are not suited to the material, and his endless quest to find meaning gets in the way of what we all want to see.
| Original Score: 3/5
Toss a plastic toy figure across your yard, and you'll have a good approximation of what this film's $140 million-plus budget bought its producers.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Ang Lee's interpretation of the Marvel Comics hero is a sci-fi/action thriller art film that tries valiantly to re-create the graphic- novel experience, but lacks a certain insanity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Hulk is the lumpiest amalgamation of sci-fi and psychological drama since Steven Soderbergh's misfired Solaris.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Fans of the comic book will probably be pleased and thrill seekers in general will get plenty to chew on.
There is still much to keep you riveted.
| Original Score: 3/4
Lee's vision of Hulk is fresh and exciting, and he has fashioned a motion picture that's a breath of fresh air.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a corker -- big, exciting, opulently designed, gorgeously shot and blessed with a top cast.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A big-budget comic-book adaptation has rarely felt so humorless and intellectually defensive about its own pulpy roots.
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| Original Score: C-
The upshot is sweetly melodramatic -- at least, you inevitably note, there are nominal humans aboard.
This is a superhero movie that really captures the essence of comic book pop art.
[An] impeccably crafted piece of megabuck fantasy storytelling.
Filled with visual energy, genuine artistry and compelling human emotions.
