‘The Incredible Hulk’, directed by Louis Leterrier, is the second Marvel character to have ventured onto the big screen this summer. After the flop of the 2003 film ‘Hulk’, this reboot had a lot of work to do, if it wanted to bring the angry, green giant back to his former glory.

 After a quick prologue, which quickly and efficiently details Bruce Banner’s (Edward Norton) transformation into the Hulk, we discover that Banner is now hiding in Brazil, trying to learn to suppress the monster within (I have never, ever used such a cheesy line in my writing, and I apologise for that). After being discovered by the US military, Banner finds himself on the run again. Despite the fairly long running time (almost two hours) the film rarely becomes dry or uninteresting. Nothing important is just skimmed over, it’s fully fleshed out, and I was entertained through the entire movie. The evolution (pun intended) of the two main characters, Bruce Banner/Hulk and Emile Blonsky/Abomination (Tim Roth) was a lot deeper than I’d expect from a comic-book movie, which was a nice surprise.

The evolution of the two main characters was that bit more interesting, thanks to the excellent performances of Norton and Roth. Norton was convincing in every aspect of his performance, which made his character very easy to relate to, which is the Holy Grail of superhero movies. As for Tim Roth, his performance as the power-hungry ‘Abomination’ was superb, and watching his descent into insanity over the course of the film was definitely one of the high points, for me.

In contrast, Liv Tyler as the stereotypical love interest Betty Ross was bland, not that the character was particularly interesting anyway. As well as being thoroughly unconvincing and undeveloped, she’s an incredibly fickle character, happily ditching her boyfriend for Banner as soon as he shows up. That, or maybe she’s just really loyal. Either way, she was a poor character, effectively nothing more than a big-name plot device with far too much screen time. Hopefully she’ll feature less in any follow up movies.

Since this is a comic-book movie, ‘The Incredible Hulk’ had to serve up a decent amount of action and CGI to satisfy all the big kids (the type that genuinely have to restrain themselves from shouting “Hulk Smash” every time something gets broken by a giant green fist), and it’s delivered some very good action sequences. Watching Hulk smashing his way through a horde of tanks or pummelling Abomination with cars is great fun, especially with the superb CGI, and the action scenes without much CGI - the free-running scene in particular - are brilliant filmed.

So, as you can guess, I genuinely liked ‘The Incredible Hulk’. It’s a very well told story, that didn’t need to overdose on action to keep me entertained. Die hard Hulk fans should prefer this reboot since it is much closer to the original storyline (as well as the references to other Marvel characters and films that are dotted around the movie), while more casual fans of comic-book and superhero movies won’t feel isolated. It’s probably one of the better Marvel films, and I recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed a comic-book movie. I’m really looking forward to any sequels to this movie.

4/5

See the trailer here