Review of The Incredible Hulk

The tribulations of the Incredible Hulk — and, by extension, The Incredible Hulk, Universal's latest adaptation of the angry green giant — come from the long-standing challenge of turning something unpleasant into a work of entertainment. A horrific manifestation of meek scientist Bruce Banner's inner demons, the Hulk theoretically belongs in the classic horror genre alongside Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein's monster. As a creature of the comics, however, in the colorful realm of pop art, his fun side remains notoriously elusive. Dating back to the blithely cheesy score for the 1966 animated series ("Ain't he unglamo-rays?"), attempts to encompass the Hulk in a gleeful spirit have been repeatedly ill-informed. The 1977 series with Bill Bixby became a national joke; Ang Lee's generally reviled 2003 treatment, Hulk, went too far in the other direction, and the murky drama that resulted from his intentions left few people satisfied. The studio's do-over, while hardly a masterpiece, at least manages to align the character with the energized tropes of contemporary superhero franchises by making his strength the real star of the show.

By handing the directorial reigns to Louis Leterrier, the Parisian filmmaker responsible for the breathless Transporter films, Universal reveals its desire to emphasize spectacle over story. Banner, played by Edward Norton as a fearful geek with noble ambitions, views his unnatural exposure to gamma radiation as a disease. The Hulk, unleashed when Banner's heart starts pounding, is the main symptom. The government, however, lead by the gruff one-note General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt), sees the power as a tool. Rather than argue, Banner hits the road. The central conflict between these two men gives the movie its thrust (Liv Tyler, as Thaddeus' daughter and Banner's lover, hovers helplessly nearby), and the simplicity of their spat clears the road for the Hulk's emergence in a series of aggressive confrontations. In other words, an action movie.

The Hulk usually oscillates between two dire scenarios: He's either attacked by oppressive humans looking to capture him or used by Banner in carefully calibrated strategies to confront evil. Either way, he's a crazed militant psychopath, but never purposeless. The new version, written by Zak Penn, gets that much right. The Hulk, and his frightful foe (the Abomination, also played by Tim Roth) he battles in the climax, were developed as weapons. The Hulk becomes tolerated, if not fully accepted, when Banner and those around him understand how to fulfill his original destiny. You can forgive the fairly sloppy dialogue and occasional continuity errors if only for the gratification of seeing the Hulk transform into a lopsided hero when he finally teams up with the armed forces (possibly a keen introduction to his role in a developing Avengers movie, but those subtle commercial motives deserve separate analysis).

Watching the Hulk do his duty, it's easy to see how he represents psychological liberation. "You're everything he bottles up," explains Banner's pal Rick Jones to a slightly smarter version of the beast in preeminent Hulk comic book scribe Peter David's series. "Not just anger, but other stuff, too. Like jealousy and passion." Hence, the Hulk of Leterrier's film, tearing apart cars like paper and generating robust gusts of wind with a single hand clap, becomes a seething mass of desperation taking out his frustration on the world and finding catharsis in his defiance of human fragility. "It's beautiful," reflects amoral whackjob scientist Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) after witnessing the brute materialize. "God-like." More than that, he's the ultimate flawed American superman.

As such, the Hulk has a definite political dimension, struggling to comprehend the bureaucracy around him. "I hate the government as much as anyone, but you're being a little paranoid," Banner gets told, and he's the first to admit his disillusionment. "It's like somebody poured acid in my brain," he moans. Together with the Hulk — essentially as his sidekick — Banner seeks a middle ground (and so does the franchise). But no amount of control prevents the Hulk from engaging in bouts of vicious destruction. By emphasizing these episodes over Banner's pathos, Leterrier actually lends a thin element of topicality to him. In Mr. Freedom, William Klein's great 1969 spoof of patriotic aggression (recently released on DVD by Criterion), the titular liberal-hating demagogue `embraces the mantra that "Might is right, and right is freedom." The Incredible Hulk reduces that sentiment to a triumphant roar: "Hulk smash!"

Review of The Happening

One might charitably describe "The Happening" as a transitional work for M. Night Shyamalan. In an attempted rebound from the critical and commercial calamity of "Lady in the Water," the writer-director has scaled back most of his characteristic touches -- the contorted horror/fantasy mythology, the "gotcha" twist ending, even his trademark cameo -- instead serving up a patchy, uninspired eco-thriller whose R rating (a first for Shyamalan) looks more like a B.O. hindrance than an artistic boon. After an initial bloom of interest, the Fox release will likely wilt quickly in the summer heat.

At the very least, Shyamalan's latest will almost certainly be greeted with less impassioned scorn than its predecessor; unlike 2006's "Lady in the Water," it arrives in theaters unencumbered by embarrassing tie-in tell-alls or reports of overweening directorial ego. (And if there are any movie critics among "The Happening's" many victims, the pic doesn't call attention to it.)

Trouble is, it's hard to imagine "The Happening" being greeted with much impassioned anything. Shyamalan's story -- about a married couple and a small child being driven farther and farther from civilization by a fatal airborne threat -- covers territory already over-tilled by countless disaster epics and zombie movies, offering little in the way of suspense, visceral kicks or narrative vitality to warrant the retread.

A mildly creepy prologue unfolds one morning in Central Park, where several pedestrians suddenly freeze in place and others start committing bizarre acts of self-mutilation and suicide. ("Those people look like they're clawing at themselves," marvels one onlooker, in one of the script's less felicitous examples of telling and not showing.) Meanwhile, the leaves rustle ominously in the wind, providing an early clue to the source of this strange, and deadly, epidemic.

Cut to Philadelphia, where high school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) hears of what is initially characterized as a bioterrorist attack. He and his lovely, slightly kooky wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), traveling with math teacher Julian (an over-talkative John Leguizamo) and his 8-year-old daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), flee the city, only to have their train break down in the middle of nowhere.

Julian abruptly leaves Jess in the care of Elliot and Alma so he can catch a ride back to the city to search for his wife. Hiking across broad, rather beautiful stretches of Pennsylvania farmland (mostly shot on location), the three soon hook up with other refugees, only to find their way blocked by fresh corpses at every turn -- they see dead people! -- suggesting the danger is closing in on all sides. Yet the fact that the infected kill only themselves immediately dilutes any sense of real peril.

Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock have been Shyamalan's two most oft-cited filmmaking forebears, and the scenario here carries faint echoes of Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and, particularly, Hitchcock's "The Birds," in that the nature of the threat here (cue more wind effects and trembling branches) seems organic rather than man-made. Elliot, being a science teacher, deduces what's going on fairly quickly, spouting the occasional mouthful of botanical mumbo-jumbo when he's not arguing with Alma.

As he did in "Signs" (which "The Happening" comes to resemble as its characters seek refuge in a little house on the Pennsylvania prairie), Shyamalan tries to show a family breaking down, then piecing itself back together, while an apocalypse rages outside its windows. Yet he never taps into what makes Wahlberg and especially Deschanel so uniquely edgy and compelling to watch, and, although both actors emote bravely, neither feels like an intuitive match for their underwritten roles.

While the R rating allows for more explicit gore effects than Shyamalan has resorted to in the past, the violent incidents are relatively few and typically viewed from a distance. The helmer's gift has always been for conjuring suspense from silences, shadows and enclosed spaces, a talent that gets little workout here.

In short, this is a Shyamalan movie minus the bravado, the swagger; there are no audacious attempts to pull out the rug from under the audience, no ham-fisted lessons about the importance of religious belief or the power of storytelling. The director even limits his customary appearance to an offscreen role, a choice that seems sadly in keeping with the rest of this oddly hesitant, insubstantial film. The big surprise at the end of "The Happening" is that even viewers who've been annoyed by his tricks and traps in the past may find themselves hoping he uses them -- or something better -- the next time around.

Review of The Last Legion

“The Last Legion” isn’t half bad, but you’d never know that from its half-hearted promotional campaign. The cheesy-looking TV spots, lobby posters and newspaper ads. At its infrequent best, however, this ungainly international co-production more closely resembles an old-fashioned Saturday matinee action-adventure. Pic is seriously hampered by glaring inconsistencies of tone and intent, and often feels like a series of highlights carved out of a much longer epic. But cable and homevid viewers might enjoy the fitfully rousing hodgepodge after it completes a token theatrical run.

The episodic screenplay, based in part on a historical novel by co-scripter Valerio Manfredi, pivots on the misadventures of 12-year-old Romulus Augustus (Thomas Sangster), a direct heir to Julius Caesar.

Shortly after he’s crowned emperor of the crumbling Roman Empire in 476 A.D., young Romulus is in short order orphaned, deposed and exiled by the hordes of Odoacer (Peter Mullan), a Goth usurper.

Aurelius (Colin Firth), one of the few military commanders to survive the barbarian invasion, leads his faithful men -- and a sword-swinging Byzantine beauty named Mira (Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai) -- on a rescue mission to free Romulus and his enigmatic tutor, Ambrosinus (Ben Kingsley), from a fortress on the Isle of Capri.

But the good guys are betrayed upon their return to Rome. So they venture off to Britannia to seek help from the last remaining Roman Legion loyal to the young emperor, all the while pursued by the bad guys and threatened by an even worse tyrant.

The chief problem with “The Last Legion” stems from the filmmakers’ apparent inability to decide what kind of pic they wanted to make, and what sort of audience they wanted to target. There are echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” and “Treasure Island,” suggesting that helmer Doug Lefler and his collaborators may have envisioned purposefully retro, family-friendly fare. (Another indication: Violent scenes obviously have been tweaked to remove detailed depictions of carnage.)

In a handful of other scenes, however, there are hints of tongue-in-cheek send-up, particularly whenever Firth laces his straight-faced heroics with a smidgen of “Indiana Jones”-style jokiness. These modestly clever touches are a welcome contrast to the inadvertently comical scenes where characters posture and pontificate in the stilted manner of standard sword-and-sandal (or sword-and-sorcery) B-pics and TV dramas.

As Ambrosinus, a cryptic sage who serves as Yoda to Romulus’ Luke Skywalker, Kingsley must deliver most of the faux profundities that litter the script. He also has to impose some sense of consistency on a character whose abilities are never entirely clear: During a climactic battle, Ambrosinus is able to toss -- goodness gracious! -- great balls of fire. But the sudden display of this convenient talent likely will make some viewers wonder why he couldn’t have used it earlier.

It doesn’t help that “The Last Legion,” filmed on locations in Tunisia and Slovakia, boasts production values that reflect a severely limited budget. On the other hand, Sangster makes an engagingly plucky impression, Firth does the derring-do with self-assured grace, Rai is extremely easy on the eyes and Kingsley is, despite the aforementioned obstacles, effortlessly authoritative. The fight scenes are sufficiently exciting, and the pic overall is just good enough to make you wish it were a lot better.