So I Watched: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Wooft.
I went into this one expecting a downgrade from Iron Man, both because that's the general consensus and also my own memories, but I'm surprised at just how bad this one actually is.
The immediate tell that this one is an unsure, aimless mess is that it's quite clearly trying to pass as a continuation of Hulk 2003 with Bruce living in South America as a fugitive from the USA but it not only has zero real spiritual continuity with that movie, it still acts as a sequel despite allegedly being the start of Hulk's involvement in the MCU and that sense of "wait, did I miss a movie?" is what pervaded half the runtime.
Bruce's in-world backstory is exposited near-entirely in the opening montage, which in itself is so overwrought that it would feel like a parody of the MCU's shoddy storytelling were it not the second entry in the entire franchise. It's evidently banking on the idea that the average viewer already knows who Mr Hulk is yet nonetheless still spends a substantial amount of its runtime avoiding and building up to Hulk Stuff. Iron Man quite deftly took advantage of his relative obscurity outside of the Comics sphere to weave a story that acts as both setup and exploration, successfully subverting what we'd come to call Surf Dracula writing, but 2008 Hulk is so intent on edging the viewer that the writers end up Surf Dracula'ing the term "Hulk Smash".
Perhaps more alarming is the film's deep self-seriousness. The 2003 film understood the absurdity in trying to do serious character drama about a big green guy and leaned into it to make a pretty cerebral character drama. 2008 Hulk is equally serious but is unwilling or unable to do anything with this. The vast bulk of the movie is shot and scripted like a 2000s thriller movie… You know, like Jason Bourne. Characters love speaking in either military jargon, clapbacks or hushed half-sentences. It's a movie that is quite clearly disinterested in itself, speeding through simulacrums of drama so it can get to the military wank and fight scenes. Neither of these are compelling. Worst of all: It's not funny. It's aggressively not funny. You can quite literally see, in big bold highlight marks, where someone reviewing the script wrote "ADD JOKE HERE". Blonsky getting football kicked immediately after taunting Hulk is funny, though. I'll give them that.
There's also the matter of Betty Ross, Bruce's love interest. While people have attempted to rehabilitate her image in the intervening decades, I reject this. Elizabeth Ross is not a character in this story. She is Bruce's mother. She does not have wants or desires or thoughts or feelings, she is there to coddle Bruce and manage his emotions. She dresses him, cuts his hair, calms him down when he's hulking out, and is ultimately there as a literal anchor for him. Bruce, in turn, plays the role of the Clever Son. He's messy and unorganized but he's smarter than his mother and much wiser in the moment-to-moment of life. This is so baked into the DNA of their dynamic that neither the movie nor its characters actually address the fact that Betty is clearly cheating on her partner with Bruce.
I hate to keep invoking Iron Man but that was a movie that really knew how to use its runtime. It never wastes a scene and it really uses its incredibly small cast as best as it can. This? You could cut about 40 minutes of the movie and it'd arguably be to its benefit. It's functionally two separate movies stapled together - Bruce's escape from the manhunt in South America & his hunt for a cure in the USA alongside Betty - but neither of these are utilized particularly well, feel completely discordant with one another, and are overlong. This is a movie that changes to a different movie at the exact halfway mark, to the point where I said "THERE'S AN HOUR LEFT?" out loud when I paused to go get a drink.
The most material part of this self-tension is that, for the most part, 2008 Hulk has nothing to say or comment on. It gestures at some notion that Bruce has to learn to live with the Hulk but this plot beat is executed so messily that it becomes thematically hollow, and subsequent writers over the decades have had to finish that arc on their behalf. This plot isn't helped by the fact that whoever wrote the script decided that Ed Norton should be an absolute black hole of charisma. In his scenes with Liv Tyler and the various Brazilian side characters in the opening he's mostly carried by them, and in solo scenes it feels more like watching an amateur film reel that someone accidentally uploaded to Youtube.
Also, not to leave it as mere implication, the action scenes it's clearly speeding towards are bad. In my Iron Man writeup I praised that film for managing to keep a sense of weight in the final fight, remembering that the machines involved are extremely heavy suits of metal and machinery. 2008 Hulk feels distinctly weightless in a way that's hard to pin down but nonetheless tangible. The man himself picks up trucks and cars and uses bisected metal as punching gauntlets, yet the film is still getting mogged on that front by the Transformers movies. Even the bad ones. Hell, especially the bad ones.
In a way, 2008 Hulk feels like looking at what the MCU would inevitably become. As far as Phase One and even Phase Two movies go it's aimless, stumbling over itself, somewhat ashamed of the material it's adapting (to the point of making a DmC Devil May Cry-level joke about the Hulk's shorts) and clearly propelling itself on a combination of financial obligation and necessity. It is a movie with deep pockets funding it yet is unable to really show that in a way that matters. Is it any wonder that everyone involved basically disavowed out? You tell me that the characters wouldn't reappear until 2025 and I believe you intuitively.
Alright… Iron Man 2 next, then I'm free of mediocrity for a couple of films.