Marvel's The Avengers

Team America: World Police 2

Grade: B +
Director: Joss Whedon
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth and Jeremy Renner
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 35 min.

The long-gestating Marvel superhero showcase The Avengers comes saddled with hulking expectations, an ironfisted fan base, and hawkish backers hoping the latest entry in this banner franchise can captain the American movie scene back from recently stark box office tallies.

The looming quandary—beyond the fact that it’s impossible to fashion a pun using Thor—is how to cobble together a satisfying and sensible ensemble film spawned from a quintet of cinematic table setters ranging from good (Iron Man) to middling (Thor, Captain America and The Incredible Hulk) to woeful (Iron Man 2).

Helmed by writer/director and part-time comic book author Joss Whedon, The Avengers manages, against formidable odds, to hit all the right notes. Based on the premise of the very first Avengers comic in 1963, Earth’s mightiest heroes, chaperoned by the cyclopean Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), must join forces to thwart the aims of revenge and world domination by Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the estranged brother of Asgardian demigod Thor (Chris Hemsworth).

Long before a climactic Transformers-style battle royale in which the Avengers must repel an invasion by the Orc-like Chitauri, the true tension is between the superheroes themselves. As a roiling brew of ids and alpha males, these crusaders bicker and bloviate, each of them representative slices of American masculinity: God (Thor), Country (Captain America, again Chris Evans), wealth (Tony Stark/ Iron Man, still Robert Downey Jr.), sex (Natasha Romanoff/ Black Widow, filled by Scarlett Johansson’s pouty lips and skintight pants) and testosterone-driven rage (Bruce Banner/ Hulk, now played by Mark Ruffalo and a 20TB server, respectively). Whether the group could defeat Loki isn’t really in doubt; the question is whether they can ever co-exist, much less collaborate in the first place.

Whedon manages to successfully juggle screen time to afford each character their moment in the spotlight. There’s even a nod to the villainous comic book origins of Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) when Loki hijacks the ace archer’s mind for nefarious purposes. Shrewder still is that the script doesn’t take itself so serious, often allowing humor to drive the narrative even more than action. Spearheading that effort, of course, is the indomitable Downey, who is wisely given space to wisecrack—e.g., he calls the full-maned Thor “Point Break” refers to Hawkeye as “Legolas” at one point—and recapture the devil-may-care daredevil from the first Iron Man. Even Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) pops up to rekindle her Nick and Nora-esque repartee with Her Boy Stark.

Action lovers needn’t fret, however, as the film has more than its fair share of computer-generated F/X eye candy to spackle its plot holes and utter lack of depth (passing allusions to forcible interrogation and clean energy feel like they belong in another movie). Titanic tussles between Iron Man and Thor and, later, Thor and The Hulk are the stuff of fanboy dreams. The Dark Knight this isn’t—instead, The Avengers is a superhuman three-ring circus filled acrobatics, wild beasts, clowns and all the popcorn you can munch. Oh, and a Hulk.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Incredible Hulk

You break it, you bought it.

Grade: B
Director: Louis Leterrier
Starring: Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, William Hurt, Tim Roth, Ty Burrell, and Tim Blake Nelson
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Among its many failings – mediocre casting, visual effects, and scriptwriting, for starters – the cardinal sin of Ang Lee’s The Hulk was miring itself in the middling morass of its protagonist’s split psyche. Once the thematic mainstay for comic book-based film adaptations – Superman II and III; Spider-Man 2 and 3; every Batman movie ever made (Bruce Wayne even dated a shrink in Batman Forever, for Pete’s sake) – this Freudian well began to run dry just in time for Lee’s turgid rendering of arguably the comic book kingdom’s ultimate exemplar of “duality of soul.” Batman Begins succeeded because Christopher Nolan, perhaps the preeminent surveyor of fractured cinematic psyches, expanded the “crisis of conscience” motif from the micro to a meta-examination of our post-9/11 world (which early indications suggest will continue in The Dark Knight). And, Iron Man was a box-office breath of fresh air partly because Tony Stark, while reshuffling his priorities, never veers from his basic wiseacre, fun-loving persona.

The CliffsNotes’ version of Bruce Banner’s psychological journey in The Incredible Hulk, the unofficial sequel to Lee’s 2003 misstep, goes from battling to suppress/eradicate the not-so-jolly green giant to harnessing and maybe even living in harmony with his inner-Id. Holed up in a Brazilian favela, we find Banner (Edward Norton) living in a clandestine self-exile, wiling away his days searching for an ever-elusive cure and new ways to keep his heart-rate below 200 beats per minute. He is beleaguered, cursed with access to an astounding brute power that, by also proscribing physical exertion, strong emotions, and even sexual potency, ironically robs him of his manhood. He is also besieged, still being hunted by his nemesis, Gen. ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross (William Hurt, taking over for Sam Elliott). Ross enlists the aid of a past-his-prime military commando, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who eventually takes a shine to the Super-Soldier serum he receives in order to better combat The Hulk.

Ross and Banner’s explosive, CG-enhanced enmity stretches from South American slums to a college campus in Virginia to the Big Apple, where Hulk must lock horns with Blonsky’s abominable alter-ego after it goes Cloverfield on the streets of Harlem. The Captain Ahab-Moby Dick traveling roadshow grows redundant, whilst Banner and Betty Ross’ (Liv Tyler) star-crossed romance suffers from lazy development, Tyler’s stilted performance, and evident allusions to King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Louis Leterrier, working off a script co-written by Norton and Zak Penn, sets up easy, trite bogeymen – the government; man’s proclivity to play God – for a paper maché plot that, for all its wise refocus of purpose, eventually devolves into the F/X realization of the idiom “Hulk Smash!”

This is a fanboy’s Hulk, from its visual razzmatazz to the expansion of its characters base to the copious nods to the erstwhile television series, including a shot of Bill Bixby as Banner watches an episode of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, a brief reprise of the show’s plaintive closing ditty, and the de rigueur Lou Ferrigno walk-through (“You’re the man,” exhorts Norton’s Banner). However, the most enduring aspect about The Incredible Hulk might be found in the few minutes comprising its opening credits and, later, the closing cliffhanger. During the former, as imagery of The Hulk’s gamma-induced birth is recreated using Norton’s Banner and Tyler’s Betty (essentially attempting to rewrite/erase the history of Lee’s original?), a collage of news reports and government documents flash fleeting glimpses of two names: Stark Industries and Nick Fury. Along with the film’s coda, and its much-ballyhooed Robert Downey, Jr. cameo, the two bookends hint at the ongoing assembly of a contiguous Marvel movie universe first teased by Samuel L. Jackson’s cameo after Iron Man’s closing credits.

It is illustrative of the state of the genre (and season) when the director of The Transporter movies conjures more popcorn-munching verve than Ang Lee. It is also indicative of The Incredible Hulk’s relative stature when Downey’s mere 2-minute throwaway overshadows the 112 minutes that precede it.

Neil Morris