Usually when I see a movie in the theater
that I don’t enjoy I don’t run home and write how I hate it. I believe
in giving bad movies a second chance. After all it could always be me. I could be having a bad day or maybe the theater set up is off or whatever.
Sometimes that second viewing redeems the film. I find something good
about it or something less crappy. Sometimes, like in the case of The Hulk, the
second viewing does nothing but amp up the pain. The Hulk is the second suckiest
comic book film I have ever seen (the first suckiest being Daredevil which I still haven’t the strength to review). The film is poorly written and over directed.
There really is a difference between achieving the kinetic feel of a comic book and mercilessly directing a movie to
within an inch of its life.
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You're gonna get back in that ring son and you're gonna defeat Andre the Giant! |
So if you don’t know what the Hulk
is I’m not going to tell you cause everyone knows that. We meet little
Bruce’s dad who as a mad scientist has naturally been denied permission to pursue his crazy dangerous research so that
he may conduct said research in secret to eventually be caught and then to flip out and cause a horrible gamma radiation explosion,
of course! Fast forward to grown up orphan Bruce who has coincidentally become
a scientist conducting near identical research as his father whom he can’t remember with his ex-girlfriend, who coincidentally
was raised at the same military base as Bruce with her father, who happens to be Bruce’s dad old boss/nemesis. Of course they suck at their jobs, which will naturally lead to a wacky gamma radiation
mishap.
Surprise!
Bruce’s dad is still alive and just as crazy as ever! Also he’s
a dog hobo. And of course he’s going to continue his research cause he’s
a MAD SCIENTIST!
Hey, let’s fiddle with the Gamma Plot
Device. Oh, no something’s wrong!
Let me take a massive blast of gamma radiation to my nads! Score! I’m a SUPERHERO! Who’s the
green nuclear physicist who’s a sex machine to all the chicks? HULK! Watch me go all Oasis on my lab. HULK
SMASH!
This is usually the part where the review
continues but it’s not. In the theater I sat for the whole movie, wide-awake
the whole time but I couldn’t tell you how it ends. I remember he fights
a mutant poodle, gets captured by the government, escapes, hops around and then…
I have no idea. For the past two days I have been trying desperately to
finish this crappy crappy movie. Much like Algebra homework or the sound of a
gentle rain, The Hulk has been consistently been lulling me into sweet forgetful sleep.
I wake up, skip back to the last chapter I remember and continue. Even
then, when I go to write about what I’ve seen the memory has already slipped from my mind and evaporated into endless
loops of the smarmy military suit Talbot getting blown up. Then I employed
the tactic of having pen and paper at hand as I watched the film. But so overcome
by boredom and confusion, I was unable to commit a single thought to paper.
Then it occurred
to me… I was forgetting for a reason. Like Bruce Banner, my knowledge of
this film must be so psychologically damaging that I’ve locked the knowledge deep in my subconscious to protect myself. I know in my heart that for my own safety I should never recover such memories. I don’t need to know how The Hulk ends.
It’s like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the
Enterprise keeps blowing up… or wait, maybe I’m thinking of that episode with the phantom planet aliens that gas
everyone and Picard orders Data to lie to him if he ever asks Data about what happened but Beverly gets all nosey goose and
almost gets everyone killed. Yeah that was the episode. That one with the exploding Enterprise was better though.
TRIVIA: The Hulk holds the record for largest second weekend box office drop for a film that opened at #1, with
a -69.7% drop.
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