I saw Hulk earlier this evening. A bit of a mixed bag, but overall much better than I'd expected.
First, the good points – starting with the biggest surprise. For the most part, the CGI work on Bruce Banner's angry alter ego worked far better on the big screen than the TV ads and cinema previews suggested. True, there's no danger of the audience forgetting that they're watching a computer-generated character, but when you see entire scenes with the character it's clear that the animators and actors did a good job of making him expressive enough to carry the role. In my book, that's a much trickier job, and far more important as far as engaging the audience in your storyline goes.
Equally important was the way the CGI was used: I didn't see a single gratuitous sequence thrown in just to show how cool it was: whether the Hulk was playing the hammer thrower with a tank's turret, climbing up the fuselage of a jet fighter or simply smashing through the side of a house, all the spectacular CGI work was subordinate to the demands of the plot. (That said, some of the scenes where Hulk was in action were simply enormous fun – especially the scene with the tanks.) My favourite Hulk scene was a much less dynamic one: his first encounter with Betty. The moment where her torchlight caught something huge standing behind a tree, then we saw that it was Hulk watching her, shrouded in darkness, worked really well. His posture, his shyness, caught the essence of Hulk's nature beautifully. One important point about that scene was that it didn't involve any … energetic … editing. Ang Lee used all sorts of dynamic transitions and split-screen effects to make watching the film seem like reading a comic book, but whilst this was indisputedly clever I don't think it added much to the film. One point in favour of the slashy editing was that it did go some way towards making the first forty minutes or so, which Ang Lee spent setting the scene for what was to come and pointedly not showing us the big green guy, go by painlessly. Some viewers might have found the pacing of the film lacking, particularly compared to the headlong rush of an X-Men 2, but I thought that the time spent setting up the history between the main characters worked well.
You couldn't call this an actor's film, but there were some decent performances. Sam Elliot and Jennifer Connelly did as much as they could reasonably be expected to with their underwritten roles, whereas Nick Nolte got plenty of lines (too many, in truth) and chewed scenery just as his role demanded. Eric Bana was only adequate as Bruce Banner, but that's about as much as the script allowed him to be considering that Bruce Banner just isn't very interesting unless he's green, muscular and twenty feet tall. The real weak link in the major roles was Josh Lucas, playing Talbot, the standard-issue amoral businessman determined to exploit Hulk and kill Banner. A dull, dull character thrown in solely to provoke Bruce Banner to turn into Hulk at a convenient moment in the film.
If the film had a real flaw, it was that final confrontation between Bruce Banner and his father. It was far too confusing and the one moment when the film wobbled in the direction of an SFX-fest. Certainly the film's father-son storyline needed some sort of climax, but giving David Banner big-time superpowers and having the military co-operate by giving him a chance to meet his son one last time just didn't make sense.
Altogether, I thought that given the umpromising source material Ang Lee did a fair job of putting together an entertaining superhero film. Not up to the standard of X-Men 2, but not at all bad.