2003 - HULK, See the epic battle between the big green monster and a poodle!!

What was anyone thinking when they decided to turn the Hulk into a Ingmar Bergman like family tragedy?  Most of the film's  running time is taken up in exploring the issues of the parent child relationship, before the Hulk has his epic battle with some enraged dogs, in particular a hulk like snarling poodle.

Hiring arty director Ang Lee and his partner the Columbia University professor James Schamus to focus on the tortured inner psychological turmoil of the main characters was really going to pack the teenagers in.  Casting Jennifer Connelly the star of Requiem for a Dream and The House of Sand and Fog was kind of a dumb choice for a popcorn film.  Nick Nolte got to play the mad scientist father of Bruce Banner by channeling the actor George Zucco.

Ang Lee mimicked  the visual style of a comic book with a split screen technique throughout the film.  The problem was that everything moved so fast it was difficult to follow the action with all the jumping around between the split screens.  I know the Hulk is a comic book looking figure, but the CGI character in this film looks even more phony than usual.  In the comic, the Hulk gets around by jumping enormous distances, in the film this looks very silly.

The biggest miss in the Hulk, is that nothing happens. The first large scale action piece is literally halfway into the running time of the film. That's a hell of a lot of time sitting around waiting for the Hulk to start wrecking stuff.

Marvel knew they blew it with this version of the Hulk, they reworked the film in 2008 and turned it into a more conventional comic book movie making sure lots of stuff got destroyed throughout that film.

138 minutes.