Hulk: Critic Reviews

A big-budget comic-book adaptation has rarely felt so humorless and intellectually defensive about its own pulpy roots.

Incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid.

The special effects of Hulk's appearance may not themselves be staggering, but there's something intriguing about the compositions Lee invents for his fugitive.

Lee tries to spruce it all up with heavy use of split-screen, which is sometimes clever and sometimes distracting. But nothing can distract us from the overriding reality that too much of Hulk is a sulk.

Hulk doesn't deliver its summer payload.

A belabored, ostentatious, overlong behemoth.

Schamus and his fellow screenwriters have taken the most pompous elements of superhero comics -- the humorless archetypes, the italicized declamations -- and inflated them until they nearly burst with the strain.

The upshot is sweetly melodramatic -- at least, you inevitably note, there are nominal humans aboard.

The filmmakers said it was going to be smart -- really smart -- like all of Lee's movies. Instead, it's big, dumb and fun.

A portentous souffle that never truly rises.

A dark and serious psychological drama cum sci-fi spectacle, The Hulk is incredible for what it attempts rather than what it achieves. For some viewers, that will be enough.

Hulk is hardly a masterpiece. But it is certainly one of the most psychologically ambitious movies ever unleashed on the summer-movie crowd.

Despite the profusion of computer-generated effects, which rousingly bring the green guy to life, I often felt, for better and for worse, that I was watching a comic-book movie reconceived as a piece of serious mythmaking.

Ang Lee has boldly taken the broad outlines of a comic book story and transformed them to his own purposes; this is a comic book movie for people who wouldn't be caught dead at a comic book movie.

It's a corker -- big, exciting, opulently designed, gorgeously shot and blessed with a top cast.

[An] enjoyable summer behemoth.

A terrific, great-looking movie that's rich and memorable and almost as huge as its mighty green star.

Hulk is the lumpiest amalgamation of sci-fi and psychological drama since Steven Soderbergh's misfired Solaris.

Hulk may not jump as high as some had hoped, but it still packs a solid wallop.

Lee's talents, though vast and subtle, are not suited to the material, and his endless quest to find meaning gets in the way of what we all want to see.

An interesting effort to give one of the staples of mass entertainment something extra in the way of insight and feeling.

Big, dopey and crammed with special effects that take the breath away.

[An] impeccably crafted piece of megabuck fantasy storytelling.

This messy, disappointing, self-important and utterly humorless version of the Marvel comic book character may be the toughest flick with a green protagonist to sit through since The Grinch.

A fascinating, if flawed, extravaganza.