Remember those old Nintendo cartridges that would stop working after about a month's worth of binge playing? First you’d blow like the Big Bad Wolf on the exposed chip, then slam it up and down in the console, then maddeningly mash on the reset button … all to get Super Mario booted. When it got that bad, the games never played right again. The Incredible Hulk is attempting a similar reboot. A new director was called in to blow on the chip, a fresh Hulk was hired to shake the machine around, and that reset button has been hit and hit and hit again. And, for the most part, this Hulk may have been successfully rebooted. But what’s it been rebooted to?
Not Ang Lee’s stylish, if also misguided, Hulk from 2003. No, that’s why the reboot was requested — in fact, demanded — by fans who went ballistic when Lee tried to make Hulk poetic, a haiku of heaviness, instead of a mean, green punching machine.
The big guy’s been reset into a frustratingly average movie, void of any personality and style. Its star may be impervious to pretty much everything, but the film takes no risks with him or its bland narrative. No doubt, The Incredible Hulk should have been the first film made, but in contrast with Hulk, it’s boring. Lee’s version was a dud, but he was onto something with the comic-style framing, the introspective themes and that unique narrative structure. The best version of the Hulk character, undoubtedly, is in an unexplored peak between the two films. 
Until we get that one, though, we have The Incredible Hulk, a fresh look at Bruce Banner and his green alter ego. Banner, now played (and partly written) by Edward Norton, is a scientist on the run in Brazil. We’re given his backstory in the opening credits: Banner tests gamma radiation on himself in a military experiment; it produces his original Hulk reaction, tearing clothes and all. The experiment doesn’t go well, which is why he’s on the run from the crackpot general who thinks he owns the patent on giant, pothole-stomping men with anger management issues. 
Norton, a talented actor capable of an explosive mixture of emotions, plays the role too safe, and way too rigid. His Banner is on cruise control, very much like the rest of the movie. Overacting would have served him well, but instead he’s in a coma. He’s granted one brief reprieve: Buying clothes in Mexico, he asks for a certain kind of pants … “Mas stretchy,” he says.Norton’s no Robert Downey Jr., who gave the finger to all other comic book heroes earlier this summer as Tony Stark in Iron Man. At the end of Hulk, Downey, as Stark, makes a cameo (in the greater comic mythology, Iron Man and Hulk are in the Avengers together) and we see in startling clarity how dull Banner, or maybe just Norton, can be when compared to more interesting characters such as Stark. Maybe the cameo worked too well, though: I wished I would had seen Iron Man again and avoided Incredible Hulk altogether.
Banner may be a wimp, but his Hulk 2.0 is definitely the real deal. He’s meaner and tougher, and director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter 2) gives him more to do than anguishing over his dilemma in front of a cracked mirror. This Hulk actually stops running occasionally to show off and fight — be it with gunships, sonic pulse rays or the villain Abomination (Tim Roth), a reptilian monster created using one of Hulkie’s blood samples. The movie is a straight-up action movie, which is what these comic flicks are supposed to be. It won't be disappoint people who are looking for mass destruction. Let the smoke clear and the debris settle and the experience is hollow, void of any real enthusiasm or excitement for the genre.Not all of it is mindless punching: Hulk’s “green time” gets inventive, like when he mashes a cop car into metal boxing gloves or when he uses a clap loud enough to wake the dead (and kill the living) to put out a fire. And for the first time in the series, we start to see Hulk as a superhero capable of heroic public service and not just a botched lab experiment on the loose.
A romance with Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) figures in as well, but it doesn’t go anywhere because, let’s face it, lovemaking with the Hulk could end disastrously; the movie stops short of having Hulk endorse Magnum condoms. Tyler — who’s not half as interesting as Betty Ross’ previous actress, Jennifer Connelly — gives gooey glances at Norton, but their chemistry is weak at best. Betty has a rather strained relationship with her father, Gen. Ross (William Hurt), the military man who methodically hunts Banner across the planet. He spends much of the movie in military installations explaining things, which is déjà vu if you’ve seen even one other comic book movie. The action is intense, the Hulk looks more convincing, and the greater mythology of Hulk and his relationship with other Marvel Comics characters is an interesting addition, but The Incredible Hulk seems content with being tasteless — it’s just another comic book movie with another super character doing another round of super things.
By trying to tone down the risky Hulk, this Incredible Hulk went too far in the other direction, into complete boredom.
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