The Incredible Hulk (2 1/2 stars)
Directed by Louis Leterrier. Written by Zak Penn. With Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth, William Hurt and Tim Blake Nelson. (PG-13)
The advertising blitz accompanying The Incredible Hulk makes a point of riding another superhero's metallic coattails: "Every bit as good as Iron Man" goes the pitch. If only it were true. Louis Leterrier's attempt to reboot the Hulk franchise (after Ang Lee's praised but financially disappointing 2003 effort) is a far lesser film whose intermittent flares of promise are overwhelmed by less than convincing CGI and a script that reads like something produced by a teenaged comic geek—there's plenty of BAM!, THWAK!, and ZWING!, but other things—say, dialogue—are curiously stilted.
The film's opening sequence is an origin story in miniature, as quick cuts and flashes of newspaper clippings give us the broad strokes of the birth of the Hulk. Promising young scientist Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) used himself as a guinea pig in an experiment involving gamma radiation; the unintended result was a violent transformation into a not-so-jolly green giant when his emotions got the better of him. Unable to control himself as the Hulk, and wanted by the government—they view his work, and by extension, his body, as their property—he abandons his true love and fellow scientist Betty (Liv Tyler) and goes into hiding while he works on a cure.
When the story picks up, Banner is living in the favelas of Brazil, holed up in a tiny apartment and working in a bottling plant. This should be the first clue that the film is more interested in its visuals than its logic. The soaring shots of the favela are stunning, complete with multicolored dwellings stacked helter-skelter on a mountainside. The favelas of Rio are also one of the world's most violent, overcrowded, and crime-ridden areas—not exactly a place for a man desperate to control his anger.
After an accident at the plant alerts the U.S. government to Banner's whereabouts, the cigar-chomping General Ross (William Hurt) sends a team into the slums to capture him. Led by the blood-hungry Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), the squad is decimated and the Hulk escapes with bullets bouncing off his back, but Blonsky is captivated by what he sees, and wants a taste of the Hulk's power for himself. Ross, who still has access to the serum that Banner was working with, is happy to oblige—since he's had so much trouble with one Hulk, we're not quite sure why he thinks another might be a good idea—but he starts Blonsky to becoming something resembling a cross between a stegosaurus, a decaying skeleton and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In the meantime, Banner has made his way back to the States and reunited with old flame Betty, though his pulse-rate problem keeps them chaste. As they work on an experimental cure with a nutty researcher played by Tim Blake Nelson, Blonsky is on a tear through Manhattan, itching for a fight. When Ross finally captures Banner, he has no choice but to let him go; he's the only one with a chance of stopping Blonsky and his never-ending stream of awful, guttural one-liners.
The final fight is, like most of the Hulk-centered scenes, a letdown. The digital effects used to create the character never do justice to the essential bulk of the behemoth, who seems as light as a ballerina as he flits about. Better is the work done with the face, particularly in the eyes of a monster struggling with an almost forgotten sense of human love. But mostly, we get a variation on a scene many times over: the overwhelmed Army throwing everything they've got at the Hulk and watching it bounce off until he gets close enough to smash something. Wedged into the action are the now-expected scenes that nod to earlier incarnations of the comic hero: there's a gag about the Hulk's purple pants and a funny riff on the "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry" tagline, and Lou Ferrigno (who played the Hulk in the television incarnation) scores a cameo, in addition to providing the wounded and gravelly voice of the film's version.
Ironically, the best scenes in the film are those without the Hulk—Norton gives his usual good performance, and more about his struggle would have been welcome—and those scenes are the ones that reference the film this one compares itself to: Iron Man. There are hints of a connection in the opening credits, but the more tantalizing scene appears as a coda (one that feels like it may have been hastily added in the wake of the other film's success) where Robert Downey, Jr.—Iron Man himself—appears to see if he can interest the general in "a team" he's pulling together. It might be that the studio is hedging its bets; instead of a slew of sequels, it may be marshalling its heroes for one monster of a summer blowout.
Get Smart (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by Peter Segal. Written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember, based on characters created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. With Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Terence Stamp and Alan Arkin. (PG-13)
In Get Smart, Steve Carell continues to hone the mix of vulnerability, overconfidence and outright stupidity that has made him such a bankable commodity in the comedy world of the last few years. Whether he's the title character in The 40 Year Old Virgin or Anchorman's slower-than-slow weatherman Brick Tamland, Carell's hangdog charm has always been his best asset. Even as Michael Scott, the asinine office manager of The Office, he somehow manages to keep us rooting for him, whatever insensitive blunders he's in the midst of committing.
It's that unexpected pang of sympathy that makes Carell such a perfect choice to step into the role of Maxwell Smart, the bumbling espionage agent—a mix of James Bond and Inspector Clouseau—first brought to life in the 1960s by actor Don Adams.
Carell's Smart is an analyst for the ultra-secret government agency CONTROL, a desk jockey who dreams of becoming a field agent, despite repeatedly failing the entrance exam. He's also a wonk who keeps wanted posters on his refrigerator and listens to intercepted intelligence on his iPod during his daily commute.
The CONTROL office is as rigidly divided as a high-school locker room, with the field agents filling the role of the jocks and Smart and his fellow analysts the targets of their barbs. Smart's one friend on the other side is Agent 23 (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), a swaggering mass of charisma who makes his entrance by catching a passing fly and flicking it Kobe Bryant-style into the trash.
The tables are turned when KAOS, the counterpart of CONTROL led by the evil Siegfried (Terence Stamp; the original Siegfried, Bernie Kopell, shows up in a cameo), runs a double agent into their ranks and starts killing off their clandestine operatives. With their headquarters demolished and their identities exposed, the agency—embodied by a feisty Alan Arkin as Chief—has no choice but to promote Max and leash the surviving alpha-male agents to desk jobs that turn out to be more stressful than their field work. At one point, a jammed copier leads to an incident of office rage involving a stapler as a weapon.
Joining Smart in the field is Agent 99, the alluring Anne Hathaway, whose heavy brows and thick eyeliner echo the bold outlines of cartoon femme fatales. (Bill Murray also makes an appearance as Agent 13, a spy who operates out of a hollowed-out tree.) Almost immediately, they run afoul of a heavy on their plane and end up in a freefall game of cat and mouse, one parachute short. It's reminiscent (perhaps intentionally) of the famous sequence featuring Bond villain Jaws, but never devolves into a simple action scene. Instead, it keeps the mix of thrill and comedy the film needs.
That mix is what makes Get Smart better than most action flicks—and many comedies, for that matter. It accepts as real the cartoon spy world, and plays it straight within that world; there's no winking, no breaking the fourth wall, no Austin Powers schtick. Some of the credit for that has to go to Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, who created the characters and are listed as consultants on the film. These comedy giants have a deep-running sense not just of what is funny, but why it's funny, and their fingerprints show up in scenes like the one where Max gives chase by dangling from an airplane's tow rope. The sign attached to the plane's tail? An advertisement for a suicide hotline.
Yet the film also seems to have more on its mind than comedy; namely, empowerment. Much is made of how Smart was once wildly obese, and a dance scene with an overweight woman—one that would have been played only for laughs in a lesser film—is the most touching in the film. Add to that Agent 99's agonized-over plastic surgery and the marital crisis of a KAOS thug, and the film begins to approach something beyond broad comedy; it becomes about willing yourself into what you want to be.
Still, none of it would work if it weren't first a comedy, and that it is. The pleasures, as in Mel Brooks films of old, come in quickly passing doses, and director Peter Segal makes the debt clear in a scene where Max, having escaped from an unjust imprisonment, makes his getaway by pillaging a museum display, quite literally donning the suit of the 'sixties-era Maxwell Smart before driving away in his Ford Sunbeam. Shoe phone at his ear, Carell makes a Smart for a new century.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
