The Incredible Hulk: Critic Reviews

The audience, in all likelihood, will be so grateful not to see another joyless, inert, pea green dud that it may not mind that The Incredible Hulk is just a luridly reductive and violent B movie -- one that clears a bar that hadn't been set very high.

The new movie about Dr. Bruce Banner is called The Incredible Hulk. But let's not get carried away: The Adequate Hulk would have been a more suitable title.

What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema.

The saga is uneven and there are plot holes, but as a popcorn movie steeped in action, it keeps our attention.

A classic comic-book hero quest that, while not entirely novel, hews to its own rules and conventions with dignity and artfulness.

In their determination to make a reliable action movie, they forgot to make an interesting one.

The Incredible Hulk is The Pretty Good Hulk. All things considered, of course.

The sad truth is, a movie Hulk is less a force of nature and more a pathetic weakling.

This new production, starring Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, looks a lot better -- sometimes it looks great -- and it's a thunderously efficient enterprise, with a nice surprise at the very end.

In close-up the Hulk is more cartoonish than scary, but when he's ripping armed vehicles to shreds? Kewl.

It moves well for the most part, it delivers a worthy bad guy, and, in Edward Norton, it has a hero constantly on edge and on the run, a more swaggering and modern version of Bill Bixby's Banner from the '70s TV series.

The chief fault of The Incredible Hulk is that it aims to be the diametric opposite of Lee's, and it jettisons what actually worked.

Digital spectacle is both too much and too little, and it's beginning to put some of us in a funk of disappointment and boredom. When you've seen one half-ton piece of metal flung through the air, you've seen them all.

It sidesteps the intriguing aspects of Hulkdom and spends way too much time in, dare I say, noisy and mindless action sequences

Incredible overstates it, but The Incredible Hulk finds a viable way to retell an old Jekyll and Hyde story, dating back to the early 1960s and a Cold War that inspired its share of unruly Marvel Comics misfits.

There's enough adrenaline pulsating throughout this bang-up Marvel Comics adaptation to erase 2003's Hulk from memory (Ang who?).

Alas, The Incredible Hulk is no Iron Man, and a brief appearance by a devilishly goateed Tony Stark only serves to remind us of that fact.

This Hulk may not be a certified smash, but it makes a big impact.

Broad, loud, straight-ahead and raucous, The Incredible Hulk may not be the smoothest or smartest movie ever made, but it sure captures the spirit of its giant green protagonist.

Big, loud, messy and most of all fun, The Incredible Hulk offers more evidence that, when done right, the comic-book hero story can indeed be, well, super.

It's dismaying to think of all the wonderful performances Edward Norton has given in movies nobody ever saw. This one is high-octane slumming that will keep him in Bentleys for years.

What seemed, in theory, the least-necessary revival of a bigscreen superhero emerges as perfectly solid summer action fare.

Like its monstrous hero, The Incredible Hulk gets the job done with minimal artistry and a lot of noise.

Marvel is so busy setting up the next sale that they can't see the mediocrity built into their own formula.

The lack of character shading suggests Marvel Studios went too far in distancing itself from Lee's much-reviled predecessor. Could a better balance between brawn and brains not have been struck?