MCU Rewind: The Incredible Hulk Isn’t “Bad,” It Just Ignores Its Characters
People love to rank movies in lists from “best” to “worst,” but those labels aren’t really very constructive. Yet, any such list of the 22 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe will invariably place Louis Leterrier’s 2008 film The Incredible Hulk near the bottom. Admittedly, this is the MCU film I’ve rewatched the least. I’m not sure, but this latest viewing might only be the third time I’ve seen the film from start to finish. It’s for this reason that I say, with no small amount of surprise, that The Incredible Hulk is actually “pretty good.” It’s certainly an improvement on Ang Lee’s 2003 take on the character, but there is no question that this film doesn’t work as well as others in the MCU. What sets this film apart from other MCU films, especially 2008’s Iron Man is that it all but ignores the most important part: its characters.
One obstacle this movie had to overcome was that, unlike other Phase One MCU films, this was not a stand-alone introduction to the character. Marvel ended up with some of the rights to the Hulk, but Universal Studios maintained distribution rights for his solo films. Thus, they wanted to it to be, at least, a spiritual sequel to their earlier effort, despite recasting all the roles. Unfortunately, this resulted in the film suffering from what I like to call Teen Wolf, Too syndrome…
