Welcome back to part two of analyzing each MCU movie. If you missed it, we analyzed Iron Man the other day. However, it is now time to look at one of the lowest rated movies in the MCU, The Incredible Hulk. This movie is one that is rated the worst of the MCU by many, so I decided to try and take a look at what was good and bad about the film.

The Incredible Hulk Review

Good

Two Fight Scenes

This movie didn’t really live up to expectations. As a stand-alone movie, it is average at best. For the MCU it is one of, if not the worst. The movie drags on, however, we will get to that. The Incredible Hulk really doesn’t have too many good spots, so I had to stretch to just think of one or two.

The one cool part I liked about the movie was the multiple Hulk fight scenes. Yes, there is the factory one, however, that doesn’t show much of the Hulk. What I mean is the campus fight and the final fight both have lots of the Hulk. The CGI isn’t great by any means, but the movie easily could have made it so the Hulk was hiding out of frame or not have a lot of view of it.

While many are very thankful the MCU has become better at animating The Incredible Hulk, this would have been an even worse movie if the creature had been cut out of some of the action scenes.

The Bad

Edward Norton

Amazingly, the multiple fight scene is the only thing I can say I really even kind of liked about The Incredible Hulk. So, let’s get to the downs. First starts with Edward Norton. Not that this is much fault of his own, but his performance of the Hulk just wasn’t great. It is possible that just having Mark Ruffalo as Hulk all this time means it felt off when watching this, but Norton as the Hulk just didn’t work.

Now, Norton did openly criticize the script of The Incredible Hulk, so it is very possible that he wished to play it a different way and was told he couldn’t. Either way, when your main character just isn’t awesome in the role, the movie is going to be tough no matter what.

Villain

In the Iron Man review, I applauded the character development of the villain. The writers tried to pull a bit of a twist and actually taking time to set up who he was. In this, they had the same idea it just seemed to fail miserably. Emil Blonsky is the main villain that they try to set up over the course of the movie. However, the reasoning just feels kind of pointless. He doesn’t like losing so he openly takes something to try and make himself Hulk-like to become more powerful.

It is a typical “the bad guy is bad because he is evil” situation, where the development doesn’t really matter they just need someone for the hero to fight. Overall, it just feels lazy, uninspiring and boring.

Boringness

Speaking of boring, the biggest problem with this movie was how boring it was. Unless there was a fight scene, absolutely nothing felt like it was happening. In most movies, especially Marvel movies, there is something cool or memorable that you think back on. This movie did not have a single thing like that.

Everything the characters said or did felt both meaningless and dull. It is a huge reason why this movie is such a flop. Not everything has to be funny like the MCU has turned to now, however, everything being deadly serious or slight jokes being bad just didn’t work. The most memorable part of this may be when Banner says he “can’t get too excited” or he’ll turn into the Hulk in bed… That’s saying something.

Overall

Overall, this movie was very bad. It ranked dead last when I did my pre-rankings and it seems hard to see that it will rise at all. The tone of the movie wasn’t fun, the actions scenes were the best part and even they were well below average.

This movie just had the feel of something made much before 2008. The overall quality of it felt poor and it’s no wonder Norton was so upset. There very likely will be no Incredible Hulk 2 and with the way this one went, that is probably OK.

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