I saw it last night. I really liked it.


It manages to be a sequel to the Ang Li film (it starts off with Bruce Banner in South America in hiding because General Ross, et. al are looking for him) while not recalling much of what happened in that film. One need not have seen the previous film to follow what's going on here. It does a quick flashback to the gamma ray experiments during the opening credits and then jumps right into Bruce Banner in hiding in Brazil.

The casting here is much better with Edward Norton, Liv Tyler and William Hurt and the pacing is so much better. By comparison, Eric Bana and the consistently overrated Jennifer Connelly seem really wooden.

The first film tried to do all this psychoanalytic shit about Bruce Banner and his dad. This one is all about him hiding and then going on the run, so it moves along and keeps the tension going, even though Bruce Banner gets more screentime than the Hulk.

Not surprisingly, the CGI and overall design is better in this one than in the first. Some critics didn't like the CGI in this one either (how can they tell if a giant green monster looks "realistic" or not?) and I heard some say the pace of the action was too fast and intense. Fuck off, granddad! If you can't appreciate big monsters throwing cars at each other, you shouldn't be allowed to review this film (or perhaps any film). It is among the best films to date in the big-monsters-throwing-cars-at-each-other genre, perhaps the best.

I was never a regular Hulk reader, so I don't know all the comic stories, but I know enough to know that this film, like other recent Marvel films, tries to bring as much from the comic as possible. ****spoiler**** Appearances by The Abomination (which was stupidly given away in the trailer) and foreshadowing of The Leader (no doubt for the sequel). Also, Robert Downey makes a brief appearance in the end as Tony Stark, presaging the eventual Avengers/Marvel Team-Up film in the future.

I give credit to Marvel for aknowledging that the Ang Li version didn't do justice to the character and trying again only a few years later. I hope they do the same with Daredevil.