"The Hulk"

But "The Hulk" has no clear narrative or emotional arc. The movie seems populated with only villains -- sometimes it's the military, sometimes it's the creepy industrialist who wants to use the Hulk for his own purposes, and sometimes it's Banner's crazy dad (Nick Nolte, looking as if he were auditioning for "Quest for Fire"), who has returned to finish the experiments he started when his son was a boy. We don't even feel much for the Hulk. And that's partly because Eric Bana, with his wide face and beady eyes (and his unfortunate resemblance to '80s teen star Corey Feldman), seems to act primarily by furrowing his brow. There's no heroism or passion in this guy -- only the constipation of years of emotional torture.

Lee badly miscalculates by making the Hulk a big CGI creation. You feel no connection between the Hulk and Banner (the way you can feel the presence of the actor Andy Serkis in the CGI Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" movies). He's just Lee's destructo machine. Perhaps Lee had to convince himself that he was doing something grand and mythic here to get through the action set pieces. But when the Hulk is flinging tanks around the desert or when battling three genetically engineered killer-mutant dogs (one of them, a standard poodle, is the drag-bar Cujo), you're watching the stiffest, most removed blammo scenes imaginable.

"The Hulk" isn't simply thrown together. It's achieved, slaved-over junk. Lee has done everything he could to bring the visual experience of reading a comic book to the screen. He bisects the screen with horizontal and vertical splits. He uses triple, quadruple and quintuple frames to re-create the look of a comic. He layers frames on top of each other with something going on in each. There are all sorts of tricky dissolves and cuts. Images seem to deliquesce into each other. Traumatic memories are presented in flash cuts and have the texture of melting Silly Sand. Two- and three-stage zooms take us from, for instance, a close-up of a frog's eye to an overview of the laboratory where the poor creature is the subject of an experiment. (Even exploding frogs are tasteful in this movie.)

Lee does so much in making this movie that nothing sticks. It's exhausting. The cinematographer, Frederick Elmes, shot "Blue Velvet" for David Lynch. Yet there are only two memorable images: Crazy Nolte watching his son's apartment in the dead of night, surrounded by his evil pooches, and a slow fade as Banner is shot with a tranquilizer dart and we see his white face floating in darkness before the screen goes black.

Mostly, "The Hulk" reminds you of other, better movies you wish you were watching: David Cronenberg's moving "The Fly," "Frankenstein" with Boris Karloff (the actor who makes CGI seem forever a paltry thing), and John Guillermin's lovely remake of "King Kong." (When Betty and Banner go for a walk with a team of military sharpshooters for an escort, I flashed on the scene in "The Godfather" where a gaggle of old Italian mamas serve as chaperones for Al Pacino and his Sicilian fiancée.)

You get the feeling that Lee and his team were so fixated on the visuals that they forgot to come up with a script. The dialogue is atrocious, running to lines like, "Look at you. Soon to be a great scientist," or, "Your friend is up to something. And I'm going to get to the bottom of it." The cast is stranded. Sam Elliott looks as strapping as usual, but his peppery laid-back appeal is straitjacketed into one of those stiff military-man roles: He's a hard-on with a brush cut. As she was in the fraudulent "A Beautiful Mind," Jennifer Connelly is stuck playing the long-suffering love interest to the tormented male lead. She's as focused and serious as always, but unlike in that movie, she doesn't get to give a performance.

Nick Nolte has perhaps the movie's one truly good moment: Beholding the monster that is his son, he reaches up a fatherly hand to stroke the creature's cheek. At other times, you can't decide whether he's the most committed actor in the movie or he should simply be committed. He seems torn between parodying the stereotypical mad-doctor role and digging to find some emotional nugget in it.

I can't imagine, beyond the inevitable opening-weekend boom, that "The Hulk" will have the emotional pull or narrative strength to satisfy audiences. (At the preview I attended, the scattered applause at the end went head-to-head with the boos.) But I did have an awful thought watching it. Like "Blade Runner" or "The Cable Guy," two bad, mucked-up movies that refused audiences the pleasure of a clear story or decipherable emotion, "The Hulk" could, in a few months' time, start to attract a coterie who will lament that it was too dark and daring for mainstream audiences. Maybe the perceived worthiness of Ang Lee's reputation will win out. The movie even figures out a noble function for the Hulk: He becomes the protector of the Latin American oppressed. At last, a comic-book movie that National Public Radio listeners can be proud to take their kids to see.

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