2003, PG-13, 137 minutes

If you’re a movie geek who attends two to three screenings a week (and aren’t most of you?) you've probably heard the rumbles in the audience for months now:

“He looks so fake!”
“Is he supposed to look that crummy?”
“I can’t believe they are putting this movie out with such a lame looking character”

Well folks, the answer to the first two comments now that Ang Lee’s The Hulk has arrived is that the title character looks fantastic. He moves with grace and there is more expression on his face than in a hundred Jar Jars stacked on top of each other. His moves are fluid and you actually come to believe that a huge green monster is rampaging through the streets of San Francisco, bowling over cars and perching atop the Golden Gate Bridge.

The answer to the third comment is…amen brother! For as neat as the effects are in The Hulk, the script is a rambling, babbling mess of long-winded plot exposition and acting that ranges from wooden to extra hammy.

Long story short (oh why couldn’t the movie have gone this quickly): A scientist working on the effects of various organic and non-organic chemical mixtures on mammals loses his government backing. He decides to run tests on himself to continue his research, then he and his wife have a kid (young Bruce Banner) and the benefits of the genetic testing are passed on to him (advanced healing abilities, tougher skin). Not long after he is born, Dad goes nuts and Young Bruce is sent away to live with relatives. As he grows into adulthood, Bruce - played with an almost intense amount of blandness by Eric Bana - studies to become a scientist just like his father, and he begins running tests on the effects of gamma rays on frogs. One fateful night, something goes wrong in the lab and Dr. Banner is blasted with Gamma Rays as his doe-eyed girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) looks on in what could be horror, but maybe it’s just a glazed over shock - who knows with a performance as nonexistent as hers. The gamma rays collide with Bruce’s already enhanced body, and give him the ability to change into the big green monster of the film's title.

I could go on and on and explain how Bruce Banner’s dad (a cringe inducing Nick Nolte) comes back into the family picture to check up on the progress of his “experiment," or how Bruce laments over scrambled eggs and toast just how crazy his life has become, but I won’t bore you any more than you need to be by The Hulk.

Ang Lee seems so busy trying to make us buy into how Banner changes into the Hulk and how he is both blessed and cursed by his new found power that he forgot one simple thing: the audience needs to care about Bruce Banner before we care about what happens to him. Lee is too preoccupied with showing us the process in the lab of creating these new genetic serums and creating slick, comic book style edits (which do nothing to give you the feeling you are watching a comic come to life, by the way), that there isn’t time for him to push his actors, specifically Bana, to put a dose of the characters’ personalities on the screen so filmgoers will have something to grasp onto and cheer for while the movie unspools.

And even the lack of life in the real actors could have been forgiven had the movie given the audience more of the green guy. It seems that it takes about forty minutes for the Hulk to make an appearance, and when we do finally see him, it seems he’s only on for a brief moment of time before he changes back into Banner. The audience meanwhile has to sit and wait twenty more minutes like Pavlov’s dogs, foaming at the mouth to see the computer-generated superhero bring the film back from the brink of a coma-like boredom whenever he appears.