[After the “noted” “success” of our LOST rewatch two years ago, James and Scott are back to prepare for the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron the only way they know how: by going through the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, movie by movie. We are not very imaginative. Check in every week as we go into way too much detail about pop entertainment and frequently say people are wrong about things.]

James: what’s up, buttercup?

Scott: Just enjoying an adult beverage and watching That 70s Show onNetflix.

James: I’m waiting for my pizza dough to be ready and watching a disappointing episode of RAW. But we’re not here to talk about pizza, WWE or turn of the millennium sitcoms starring future all-star couple Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher!

Scott: We’re NOT???

James: well, I mean, we could be. It might be preferable to discussing the actual movie we watched.

Scott: Ooh boy. You know, I was really hoping that my memory of this movie was so vague that somehow it was actually very good but I had forgotten.

James: I only saw it like one and a half times before this; once in the theatre and once on TV when it hit the premium movie channel. And I remembered it being pretty good! Upon rewatching, I would like to amend that opinion. We’re talking, of course, about the second movie in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, directed by Louis Leterrier!

Scott: Just a few months after Iron Man, Marvel was plunging full steam ahead into their shared movie universe with this version of the Hulk. This was of course the second go at a Hulk film, after Ang Lee’s 2003 interpretation. Which I kind of wanted to watch to compare, but didn’t have time. You can see, in a way, why Marvel would be keen to make a second Hulk movie before doing even one Thor or Captain America… he’s familiar to casual fans, but less burdened by backstory and continuity. There’s not as much buy-in to a Hulk movie, in theory. Plus, you get the appeal of a Jekyll-Hyde dynamic with a giant green punch monster. It SHOULD be a slam dunk.

James: It’s definitely Marvel feeling pre-tty good about themselves after completely rehabilitating Iron Man and turning him into a Marvel Universe star again, and betting they could do it again with, to be perfectly frank, a character they’ve always had trouble really getting over with audiences. Ang Lee’s version five years earlier alienated audiences and made them feel sad for two and a half hours, and this is absolutely an effort to fix that. New stars, new prestige and a director at that point known for making very entertaining movies with Jason Statham.

I think, when discussing the movie, we’ll single out a few big reasons why this movie just doesn’t end up working as much as they wanted it to.

Scott: As the second Marvel U Film, produced simultaneously with Iron Man, I feel like the issue in retrospect is that the tone of the Marvel Universe wasn’t yet established. Even though all the franchises have unique notes, there’s a throughline of wit and spark that this one mostly lacks. It’s a pretty okay noisy action film without much joy. Not as dour as the Lee version, but far from Favreau’s Iron Man in tone.

James: Which is interesting, because the moments that I thought really worked? They were usually the lighter moments. Some of them were genuinely funny! The problem is that exactly none of them were scenes with the actual Hulk.

Scott: I really think I know which ones you mean, so let’s get to it. The movie begins with a montage running through the Hulk’s origin. And though it’ll be discussed in some detail later, Inc. Hulk is already different from Iron Man and all the Marvel movies to come by hitting the ground running as far as origins go. This is probably due to the earlier Hulk movie (which bodes well for those naysayers who whine that we’re gonna get another Spider-Man origin) and even though this movie actually has a different origin, it assumes a certain level of familiarity.

James: Yeah, and that’s really interesting! I like how the movie figured, “You just got a Hulk origin movie five years ago. We know you know this.”

Scott: Instead of saving Rick Jones from a gamma bomb, Banner tests a Gamma ray thingy on himself using a Chair of Science.

James: Which, actually, is pretty similar to how I think of the Hulk’s origin. Was Rick a later add-in?

Scott: It’s a loss - Rick Jones’ name pops up in a headline in the montage but he’s nowhere to be found in EITHER Hulk movie.

James: Listen, Rick Jones straight up sucks. All he deserves is his name on a screen in a montage.

Scott: Hey, I’ve got a lot of positive memories from Peter David’s Captain Marvel run, but OK. It’s clear that the Banner in this movie is a real loner, which is how most people like their Banner. As the movie begins properly, he’s in hiding in a Brazilian slum (or “favela!”) working in a pop bottling plant, which is surely a good use of his talents. Incidentally - and again, I wasn’t able to re-watch the ’03 Hulk - I think Eric Bana Banner said he was going to South America at the end of that one, too.

James: Yeah, it’s definitely a SOFT reboot, between that and the fact that it’s not an origin.

Scott: I believe I wrote down “Pseudoquel.”

Bruce is shown practicing meditation with a metronome, after 158 Days without incident. The metronome comes from Bruce Jones’ highly divisive, extremely-decompressed “Return of the Monster” run. Okay, it’s not divisive, everyone but me hated it by the end. Bruce’s later communications with a mysterious “Mr. Blue” come from that run, too.

James: Bruce is taking martial arts lessons (I assume either capoeira or BJJ) to control his breathing, working in a plant and avoiding a promotion so he can stay off the record, and quietly working on a cure for his condition while corresponding with the aforementioned Mr. Blue, an anonymous colleague who keeps asking to meet.

Scott: I actually quite liked the beginning of the movie. The bottling plant is a good setting to put Banner in: it’s hot, noisy, cramped, and full of assholes apparently.

James: It’s definitely a good way to show the ways in which Bruce has grown and gotten better at controlling his condition since the previous movie that didn’t happen. Unfortunately, Bruce’s quiet life is busted open when he cuts his hand in the pop bottling plant and somehow misses a giant smear of gamma-irradiated blood on a bottle, which ends up poisoning Stan Lee back in the States and alerting General Thunderbolt Ross, father of Bruce’s lost love Betty and former benefactor in his gamma radiation work, to where Bruce is.

Scott: William Hurt in Full Sam Elliott Cosplay.

James: They know the pop was bottled at a plant in one city and somehow from that know where Bruce, who we’ve seen taking efforts to make sure that nobody, not even his boss, knows where he lives, is hiding out. Zak Penn’s script is Not Very Good.

Scott: While Iron Man was pretty darn good at getting the little details right when characters had to be here or there, in this one stuff just sorta happens according to the laws of This Is An Action Movie. Before you know it, Ross has scrambled an elite tactical team including the very British Emil Blonsky. On loan from the Royal Marines.

By the way, for those who don’t like winky moments to a character’s other incarnations, a lot of the humour in this movie is in the form of snickering references, one of the first being Bruce’s “You wouldn’t like me when I’m… hungry” in Portuguese.

James: The first moment I laughed in the movie! I genuinely enjoyed weird, dorky Bruce Banner. The same Bruce Banner who runs out of a key ingredient and, desperate for a cure, just straight up mails a giant vial of blood to Mr. Blue in New York. The same Bruce Banner whose alias is “Mr. Green” and has green stuff all around him, from his bedspread to what the flower he needs for his experiment is wrapped in.

Scott: I want it on the record that I think Edward Norton is a fine actor, and as the “nothing seems to go my way” Banner he does a fine job. That characterization, if played to the hilt, would have given this movie some real juice, but the script doesn’t give him NEARLY enough to do with that, the way Iron Man serviced Downey. I mean, I just can’t stop thinking about how much IM got RIGHT. Instead, here there is a lot of blankly staring and heavy breathing waiting for the next thing to trigger the Hulk out.

James: It’s a big problem when your lead actor isn’t REALLY the star of the movie, in terms of character. The Incredible Hulk tries to put as much character into Norton’s Banner as they can, but it’s just slightly too much straining.

Scott: Edward Norton also does a pretty good Stefon from Saturday Night Live but anyway.

So once Blonsky & Co. track Banner down, we get a Pretty Good Chase Scene through the streets, with the added tension of, if things get too rough, he’s going to Hulk out for sure. For the first act or so, the movie is actually pretty on top of things.

James: Yeah, the script is a little sloppy at introducing some people like Blonsky, or getting a little too overcrowded in terms of the thugs Bruce works with at the plant bumping into him during the chase and joining it, but in terms of actually establishing who Bruce is, and the kineticism of the chase? Pretty good.

Scott: It also makes the objectively correct choice of not showing too much of the Hulk at first: when the inevitable transformation happens he still manages to be mostly hidden in shadows, giving it a spooky horror movie/Predator vibe that damn near traumatizes Blonsky. As Tim Roth later summarizes, “It threw a forklift truck like it was a SOFTBALL!!”

James: Blonsky has really assimilated into America.

Scott: “Cricket Ball” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

James: Yeah, it sounds natural.

Scott: Banner later wakes up in a very pretty setting, by a stream and a waterfall surrounded by the Flowers of Guatemala.

James: It’s very picturesque.

Scott: We get the first of two (2) Hulk pants jokes throughout the movie, AND a usage of the “sad piano music” from the Hulk TV series.

James: One thing we skipped over, but will continue being relevant throughout the entire movie, is that nobody in the military in this movie can figure out that bullets won’t hurt the Hulk. Even Ross, the guy who’s entire life is hunting and knowing about Hulk, and Blonsky, the super smart action ranger, just repeatedly think one more clip will do the job.

The movie cuts back to Ross, explaining the Hulk’s origin to Blonsky, who is definitely Into It. In a weird way.

Scott: They’ve got that ammo surplus and by God they’re gonna use it.

James: Ross sees the Hulk’s entire body as property of the US Army, which is an interesting shift from how I’m used to thinking of his relationship, which is usually more murder-y.

Scott: Here the Hulk’s origin is tied to the Super-Soldier program, which is I think the angle in the Ultimate U.

James: It sets up an interesting dynamic between the two, where Ross is very classically military industrial complex and Bruce is vaguely pacifistic. We also see Bruce back in the USA, something that is never once explained.

Scott: One thing that becomes clear by the time Emil becomes a Super-Soldier is that the broad strokes of the movie are very much the same as Iron Man. A new technology exists, and it could be used to do harm, but I think Banner signed on thinking it was for antibodies and such. Not that that’s a complaint, just noting it for the record.

When Banner arrives in the USA, his first stop is where it all began, Culver University, which looks strikingly like my alma mater, the University of Toronto. They use the really churchy buildings of Knox College even though there are some pretty keen modern buildings just a block or two away where actual science is done. Nothing says Impressive University like a gothic facade, I suppose!

James: It looks more traditional, if nothing else. Bruce spots his love, Betty, and thinks she’s seen him until he realizes that she was just noticing her boyfriend, Modern Family’s Ty Burrell, in a 95% wasted role.

Scott: I don’t like Modern Family, but Burrell (like most of the adult cast) is charming as the dickens. And he only gets like two lines!

James: Before Bruce can sneak into the university to get his data for Mr. Blue, however, he needs a place to lay low. And that leads him to a pizza place from back in his college days, where he and Betty fell in love over the friendly, fatherly eye of Generic Old Pizzeria Owner.

Scott: According to Wikipedia, Paul Soles, who plays this role, voiced Banner in a 1960s animated series!

James: I joke, but this is actually one of my biggest problems with the movie; in its quest to not be an origin film, it populates the movie with things that are meant to be lived in, like the pizzeria. The problem is that I actually wish I’d gotten to see that! Like, their version of the first Hulk movie sounds kinda great.

Scott: The idea of this Edward Norton squirreling up the courage to ask Liv Tyler out for pizza feels like a missed opportunity. Banner’s Pizza Ruse(TM) on Security Guard Lou Ferrigno (old school Hulk reference #4 or 5) is another hint at how Bruce might have made a pretty good protagonist if they’d kept pushing things a bit further. But since there’s not a lot of that in the movie, it comes off as a weird beat.

James: Yeah, Bruce finagles a sham job as a pizza boy out of Paul Soles, and sneaks into the university’s computer lab by bribing the security guard AND a science dork with “an extra medium,” which is both laughable (why would a pizza boy have extra?) and also kinda perfect? It’s one of those things that feels weird in between super serious science action stuff, but is also the part of the movie I like most.

Scott: So he gets the data, and reunites with Betty, and then the military shows up with Blonsky now hepped up on Hulk juice. Am I missing something? Did that all just sorta happen?

James: Yeah, the movie has pacing issues where it spends the first half hour at a really interesting, languid pace and then kicks it into high gear for a few minutes at a time before going back. It’s very jerky.

One thing that bugs me about the movie is that everybody keeps talking about how they got “close” to fixing the super soldier serum with the version Blonsky takes, and that he represents a failure. But… like, the initial dose he takes, to get him some of the Hulk’s power and hopefully help General Ross capture Bruce… works. Like, it works PERFECTLY. They did it. They recreated Captain America.

Scott: They don’t even pay lip service to the notion that Blonsky’s body or mental state is deteriorating because of it, or something. He just goes in there and goes toe to toe with the Hulk like a champ. If this movie weren’t so ignorable in the context of the MCU, that would seem like a huge plot hole.

James: Things go bad ONLY when he takes a second dose, and then takes a THIRD dose of something else, after being warned it could have a bad reaction. Uh… spoilers. But this guy, right now? He actually holds his own against the Hulk.

Scott: I remember actually being pretty impressed with it when I first saw it in theatres. I never thought they’d have a guy Roth’s size go against the Hulk onscreen and pull off making it look like a close contest in any way, but it almost looks cool. Except you know, Emil’s the bad guy. You know he’s the bad guy because he shot a dog earlier.

James: Even if he just tranqed it! It’s hack screenwriting 101 unless you are making John Wick.

Scott: What I DID like were the Sound Cannons. General Ross must have hired the DHARMA Initiative on that one.

James: Or, in this case, Stark Industries… back into weapons?

Scott: Leftovers?

James: I can only assume; you’d think this would be something the movie would get right, considering, well, it’s a Marvel Studios movie. But never underestimate Zak Penn’s ability to be bad.

Scott: I’m learning not to. He was involved in two X-Men sequels I didn’t like and one Elektra movie I didn’t see.

James: And was a writer on The Avengers before Joss Whedon fixed it. -Ish. But we’ll get to that.

Scott: Some stuff happens and Betty gets in the line of fire, and Hulk saves her from a helicopter that is crashing into them.

James: It’s very impressive, and helps convince Betty that Bruce is the good guy here.

Scott: Though Banner denies it at first, the movie takes a firm stand that the Hulk has his sense of morality. And MAYBE some of his identity. And DEFINITELY his affection for Betty.

James: There’s also an interesting camera zolly that Leterrier does in the scene, which is neat and Spielberg-y but doesn’t quite fit with the movie.

Scott: Leterrier definitely directs competently - I noticed a few weird cuts here and there, but mostly he knows how to handle action scenes and suspense.

James: So with Betty saved, the Hulk jumps off with her and we find out that the person who ratted Bruce out this time was… TY BURRELL?

Scott: ET TU BURRELL??

James: To his credit, I guess he thought Banner was actually a bad guy and regrets it immediately, after seeing General Ross’ response. So our last time seeing Burrell, Betty’s actual boyfriend, in the movie, is with him being regretful but noble. He does not reappear.

Scott: But it’s cool, because Ty then decides “You know what, YOU’RE the dick here, General Ross.” Hulk has brought Betty to a cave, where he bumps his head and roars angrily at a storm. Comedy? I snickered. Oh, and he throws a rock at the sky.

James: It’s definitely played for chuckles, and, again, is one of the many charming little moments that the movie does well, even if it just discarded a character to get there. Like, that’s the only time in the movie the Hulk seems like the same Hulk in Avengers.

However, then we cut to a news report and one of the things the movie does pretty poorly: naming people. In Iron Man, Stane’s never CALLED the Iron Monger, but he calls him and Tony iron mongers, and it makes sense. Here, some dork with a camera phone calls it “like… some sort of hulk” and boom, that is how the Hulk gets its name here. Stoned sophomores. Sigh.

Scott: By the way, according to the credits Ty Burrell is not just Betty’s Unnamed Psychiatrist Boyfriend, he is Doc Samson. Where’s THAT movie?

James: A better world.

Anyway, Bruce and Betty are now on the run, and we get four important things here:

-The second stretchy pants scene;

-The humorous argument about Betty being adorably pedantic about Bruce’s instructions about what he can and can’t use while on the run;

-Bruce vomiting up the USB of data he swallowed before hulking out;

-Betty cheats on her boyfriend

Scott: And my legit favourite line, where Betty is fussing with Bruce’s hair and wonders “How have you been doing this on your own all this time?” And Bruce’s answer: “With clippers, mostly.” Like, I dunno, it’s a sweet joke that has nothing to do with being the Hulk. I also have written down “Liv Tyler’s Nerd Glasses” and I have no idea why.

James: It’s just cute! A small character moment that works, where Betty offering to sell a super important necklace from her mother that we’ve never seen before is just kind of… bad. It’s a remnant of trying to get all this character stuff they COULDN’T do in the first movie that didn’t exist, warped through Penn’s bad screenwriting and Leterrier’s weird pacing. It really does bug me that Betty never ACTUALLY breaks up with her boyfriend before smooching and trying to have sex with Bruce, though.

Scott: It’s one of those things that the movie just forces you to assume happened even though there was no point when it could have. Like it’s saying to you “You know Better’s really with Bruce, right? Do we HAVE to show that?” Yeah, movie. IT takes two seconds. Well, maybe more like 30 but you’re nearly 2 hours long - which is actually kinda short for a superhero movie.

James: It’s yet ANOTHER artifact of not having a movie before this; it takes for granted the idea that we’ll just WANT Bruce and Betty together. They’ve spent like five minutes together on camera, not the two hours the movie wants us to assume. Once again, I actually think I would have liked the imaginary Louis Leterrier Hulk movie that came before this

Scott: And despite all the dialogue spilled about going onthe run, they only spend a scene or two on the actual run, after which point htey make it to New York where you just KNOW the military is gonna show up. Yet another weird bit of pacing-by-omission. A Hulk movie where Bruce is actually on the run would be cool!

James: Yeah, they spend just enough time on the run to not bone (Bruce will Hulk out if he gets too horny) and use a computer to send an email to Mr. Blue that SHIELD intercepts. And honestly, it’s kinda weird that after this it takes them like 20 minutes of movie time to show up. It’s weird that SHIELD just kind of… LETS Bruce and Betty meet with Mr. Blue while Blonsky’s completely successful “failure” of a super soldier body heals impossible wounds in a matter of hours, at which point he gets some new injections, because, WELP.

Scott: My favourite thing about Blonsky is that he canonically admits to being addicted to Hulk Fighting.

James: It makes his second injection basically the one thing in this movie whose motivations and cause-effect are clear and legible

Scott: So Banner and Betty make it to Mr. Blue, who is Dr. Samuel Sterns, The Future The Leader, played by another underutilized character actor, Tim Blake Nelson.

James: Well, that and the later ones that turn him into a monster. Wait… is Blonsky kind of the most well-constructed character in The Incredible Hulk?

Scott: I… guess? Like, we’re never given a chance to know what Bruce or Betty are like inside, and General Ross is just kind of flat. I want to believe Sterns is somehow a descendant of Delmer from O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU, by the way. Sterns works up a Hulk cure but he ALSO has a suspicious comma impossible amount of Banner Blood synthesized because you never know. The cure scene is… kinda cool? Okayish?

James: It’s almost over too soon! Theoretically, the whole movie and years of Bruce’s life have been building to this, and it ends up feeling kind of perfunctory.

Scott: Especially because you just know it’s not gonna take. And why doesn’t it take? Because it just doesn’t.

James: Honestly, as much as we’ve ragged on a lot of the rest of the movie, I still kind of had FUN with a lot of it. It had enough smaller moments that charmed me, even if they seemed like artifacts from another movie. But this is where the whole thing kind of falls off the rails for me.

Scott: Up until act 3, as clunky as it could be, the important parts worked.

James: Bruce is “cured,” he and Sterns have an argument about applications (Sterns wants to cure cancer, Bruce wants to… not?), and then the army comes to arrest Bruce anyway. Luckily, Blonsky, who keeps saying he’s “fine” and “like a monster,” which aren’t red flags at all when you look like you’re about to either collapse or destroy something, shows up to Sterns and says, “Hey, I would like some Hulk juice, do you have any Hulk juice?”

Scott: “Well gee whiz, you’ve already got some Hulk juice in ya. It might make you into an… Abomination!” WINK GUYS THAT’S WHO BLONSKY IS

James: God. Damn. It. All.

Scott: Lots of superhero movies go through pains to include the characters’ codenames, and Incredible Hulk might have the two worst incidents of it.

James: I’m honestly shocked that Marvel hired Penn again for The Avengers after this movie.

Scott: Meanwhile, the authorities fly Bruce and Betty away in this chopper and they have this almost eerily calm “It’s totally cool that we’re being arrested together” expression that I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to read.

James: Yeah, it’s a weird moment, especially since just a minute before, Betty was screaming at her father for arresting them. Like, “don’t ever call yourself my father again” stuff. Anyway, Blonsky is now the Abomination and goes about wrecking Harlem, and Betty shouts at General Ross, “Oh god, what have you done?!” and instead of rightfully correcting her that he didn’t actually do this, he just looks sad while Bruce decides he needs to go back to being the Hulk to save the day.

Scott: And you’ve gotta admit, Banner jumping out of a helicopter on the off chance it MIGHT turn him into the Hulk - at this point he is literally 15 minutes out of having been apparently cured - is a pretty baller move.

James: I think it would have been more baller if it had felt earned; another side effect of the weird pacing issues.

Scott: Turns out the most baller move of all is proper story structure :/

James: But yes, Bruce slams through the concrete and reawakens as the Hulk, and then he and the Abomination fight for about 10 minutes. It’s… fine, I guess? I 100% love the Hulk giving himself BOXING GLOVES MADE OF CARS.

Scott: The movie basically decides “We’ve got the two strongest monsters ever punching it out (on Yonge street) so it basically writes itself.”

James: Unfortunately it doesn’t, but, well, it DOES look cool. I know I’ve insulted the movie a lot, but Leterrier is a genuinely decent action director; I just think he’s better at in-person action like the favela chase scene than CGI fights. But, like, imagine Jason Statham punching Tim Roth with cars and choking him out with giant chains. That would be a pretty great Transporter movie.

Scott: Yeah, what we get is a little tedious, some back and forth that, since the preceding hour and a half haven’t been much fun, you don’t really buy into.

James: The movie also definitively shows that the Hulk has a conscience and listens to Betty, when he spares the Abomination (honestly, probably a mistake given how he’s basically an indestructible Hulk and is hard to contain).

And honestly, that’s a problem. It showcases a problematic aspect of the Hulk, especially in movies; we need him to be HEROIC, and the action movie rules require a big fight scene at the end, but when his defining characteristic is that he’s, as Stark describes him in Avengers, “a giant green rage monster,” that’s definitely at odds with the Hulk as a hero. So each appearance basically ends up resetting him somewhat. Hell, the end of this movie shows Bruce in the woods in CONTROL of his transformations, and then all of that is ignored when Avengers happens and he’s back to being page 1.

Scott: Ideally, the Hulk would be the villain of the piece, and the climax would be him NOT having to Hulk out to save the day, I suppose.

James: That’s the movie’s biggest fault, I guess; it was just bad enough that Marvel decided it didn’t matter. I’m really interested in seeing what Avengers: Age of Ultron does with the Hulk, whether they reset him again or roll with it.

And so, the movie ends with Bruce placing Betty’s necklace (that she sold off-screen and he got back off-screen) in an envelope and meditating his way into being the Hulk, something that likely would have destroyed his house. Oh well.

Scott: Meanwhile, General Ross drinks to his abject failure and then gets a visit from Tony Stark in a scene that actually does not make sense wit hthe way things turned out but oh well we needed a hook.

James: Tony shows up to tell General Ross that they’re “putting a team together,” which is really weird because General Ross isn’t the Hulk. Like, it does. Not. Make. Sense. At. All. And yet at the time, in the theatre, I remember thinking it was kinda cool!

Scott: I had this in my head that the big threat that would bring the Avengers together, initially, WAS the Hulk, and then something else would bring their attention that would cause him to join, but, you know, what we got was different from that.

James: Yeah, ultimately, the movie did poorly enough that Marvel just decided it didn’t count. They canceled any sequels. They recast the lead role and dropped every other character. It ended up breaking even, but it was tight. And now, it’s hard to believe we’ll ever get another Hulk movie in the MCU for quite a long time and… I think that’s okay.

James: Final thoughts?

Scott: A bunch! One, I think I’m pretty fine with the Hulk being an ensemble player. He got two shots at a centric film, most of the relevant themes have been explored, even if the best possible Hulk movie has not been made. I feel like, with the confidence of formula that Marvel movies gained after this, they actually could pull it off, but there’s no point. Keeping him as nebbishy Mark Ruffalo in the background of Avengers movies until it’s time to Punch Something Huge is an arrangement we can mostly be happy with.

Why this isn’t the best possible Hulk movie? We pointed to a few plot problems and pacing problems, but those don’t usually sink movies if they have enough going for them. The really good Marvel movies offer something more than just the thrill of watching that specific superhero use his powers. They offer you Tony Stark’s douchey charm, Captain America’s period-appropriate optimism, Thor’s grand Shakespearean drama in Asgard. Incredible Hulk just has NOTHING extra going for it.

James: Which is a shame, because it’s VERY well cast. And while Louis Leterrier is better at human action, he’s still a pretty decent director, and Marvel movies hardly call for auteurs anyway. This movie is sunk by its script, courtesy of X-Men: The Last Stand’s Zak Penn. It’s weirdly paced; motivations are quickly explained instead of shown; the only decent characterization is in the villain; etc.

Scott: There’s the germ of suspense and even a few drops of quirky wallflowery charm from Edward Norton - who probably wrote those in himself as a known rewriter. They were trying to build a brand, and they really stumbled with this one.

James: Actually, looking it up, Norton actually signed a contract that included him as a writer; so while he wasn’t CREDITED, he apparently had a significant role in the final script.

Scott: Yeah, that’s his usual schtick. I think it’s why they didn’t ask him back, and maybe some money stuff stemming from this movie’s disappointment.

James: And that might, honestly, explain some of the movie’s script problems; it was two writers just not making their halves work. Plus, apparently they cut like 70 minutes of footage, mostly from the stuff we liked - the quiet character moments and stuff that was more origin-y. But the studio wanted it short, and it got significantly cut to under two hours, much to Norton and Leterrier’s protests.

Scott: Okay, I definitely wouldn’t watch a version of this movie that was 3 hours 10 minutes, no matter how good the character stuff was.

James: Apparently the version Leterrier and Norton wanted was about 135 minutes.

Scott: That sounds right to me. What a shame.

James: And if that extra 20 minutes to the running time was character work? I wish I could have seen it. Because really, the movie we got just couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be in the time it had. Sometimes it was a fun little character piece about these people’s lives. Sometimes it was about power and hubris. Sometimes it was about punching. But NONE of that worked together, basically.. at all.

Scott: It wasn’t really about ANYTHING. And that’s fine, if you get a good fun movie out of it, but they didn’t. They didn’t make punching rage monsters fun and appealing enough.

James: And plus, it has a massive, genuine plot hole where they solved the super soldier serum problem - one of the most notable problems in ANY Marvel universe - and then kept pretending they didn’t.

Scott: In fact, they made it BETTER, since the Erskine serum only works on Steve Rogers because he’s pure of heart. Blonsky is a puppy-tranqing dick.

James: I will say, it looked good. Leterrier used grey and green really well, and some nice shot choices. Like we’ve said a few times, he’s a pretty decent director.

And with that, should we call it? I don’t think I want to talk about this movie anymore. Honestly, I’m shocked we’ve talked about it as long as we have, even if it’s our shortest recap to date. And that 2h45m recapping time included like 20 minutes here and there where I was off making pizza.

Scott: Eh, there were some good points to be made about where the movie went wrong, something we may not get a chance to discuss again until Avengers… depending if Iron Man 2 holds up

James: I was bored watching the movie and sadly, that means this recapping was just a little less fun!

Scott: But yeah, I think that does it for this week’s installment of FAST AND FURY-OUS!

James: And with that, I’ll see you next week with IRON MAN 2, a movie I have long declared to be unfairly maligned and will see if I’m still right about.