 Critics are talking about The Hulk the way intelligent people talked about Marvel Comics characters when they first began attracting sophisticated adult readers in the mid-1960s. "The movie brings up issues about genetic experimentation, the misuse of scientific research and our instinctive dislike of misfits, and actually talks about them," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. He adds that director Ang Lee "is trying here to actually deal with the issues in the story of the Hulk, instead of simply cutting to brainless special effects." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post writes: "It's not easy being green -- and it's even tougher to make a summer event movie with a brain in its head. The hugely talented Ang Lee ... deserves credit for trying with The Hulk." But Ebert and Lumenick, like most other critics, find the film itself riddled with issues that have little to do with humanity as a whole. As Ty Burr remarks in the Boston Globe: "Watching The Hulk, "one gets an overwhelming sense of well-meaning hypocrisy: of high-minded middlebrow artists simultaneously exploiting and condescending to their trash-culture source." Some critics fault the computer animation. Phillip Wuntch writes in the Dallas Morning News: "The ungainly fellow at times looks like an enlarged, ferocious variation of the Pillsbury Doughboy." But Bob Strauss concludes his review in the Los Angeles Daily News by remarking: "Any summer blockbuster entertainment this weird gets points just for being the extreme, unwieldy creature that it is." And, similarly, Joel Siegel remarked on ABC's Good Morning America: "It's a shame it falls apart at the ending but the worst thing I can say about this movie is that it's so smart, so deep, so well done it might be too good for the teenage boy audience these films are usually aimed at." |
