This time, I was a little more cautious, and waited to see the new Hulk for a bit. But the film gets it mostly right.
SPOILERS, beeotch!
Zak Penn's script does several smart things.
One, it gives us Bruce Banner's transformation from regular guy to superpowered green monster in a credits/dream sequence. This gets across a lot of information that most of the world already knows after the comics, TV show, and last movie quickly, without bogging the film down with an origin story.
Second, it puts Bruce on the run in a favela in Brazil, a visually inventive and interesting choice that shows us the lengths he'll go to to spare the woman he loves, how his daily life is impacted by his curse, and allows some jiu-jitsu training from the Gracies. There's loads of good drama the special forces team sent to capture him and the local toughs out to beat him up, and a great chase scene.
Finally, the film gives the Hulk a worthy adversary, in the form of Tim Roth's power-obsessed soldier who becomes a monster in order to fight the Hulk. Since the Hulk is insanely strong and is shown swatting away bullets and explosives and blowing up tanks and military gunships, he needs another superpowered bad guy to fight in order to provide a good obstacle.
Finally, the film gives Bruce Banner a believable character arc. He goes from trying to control the Hulk outbreaks to trying to rid himself of them to finally accepting that he needs to use his power to stop an even worse threat. This is a true hero's journey.
The film misses the boat in two key areas. One, pacing. The first hour or so of the film is great, setting up where Bruce is and that the military is after him. After he returns to the US, the film drags a little because the story gets muddled. There's no clear throughline. Bruce wants to find the mysterious "Mr. Blue" he's been IMing with and get help, but the film has him go to Betty's university, stay overnight with her, and a few other things, as well as bouncing around to William Hurt's General and Tim Roth. It's not quite clear what Bruce is doing or why until he shows up at Mr. Blue's college. This could have easily been solved by adding in a couple of lines of dialogue where Bruce explains to Betty why he's back -- "I need to get the data and get it to Mr. Blue at such-and-such college."
Second, Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky character. Other than a single line of exposition -- "I wish I could take what I knew now and put it in my body ten years ago." -- we don't know why Blonsky is obsessed with power to the extent that he'd take two experimental serums to get it and risk turning himself into a monster. Because his motivation is expressed solely through one line of dialogue, it feels a little weak. It would have been better to set Blonsky up as the ultimate badass, a guy who never failed on a mission, even under impossible odds. When he meets the Hulk, it's his first failure, and he chalks it up to being too old and too slow. Then he could give his line of dialogue about sticking his mind in his younger body. This is a simple change that would have been easy to address in existing scenes, and it would have set him up as a guy who can't stand to fail and is willing to do whatever it takes -- including dosing himself with experimental drugs -- to succeed.
And the Tony Stark cameo was cute, even if it was basically the exact same epilogue as the one in IRON MAN.
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