THE INCREDIBLE HULK

Though the new film has its merits, the Hulk himself still looks stupid, writes Donald Clarke.

AWW! It's the little blockbuster that got cast aside. While the film community has been busy analysing Indiana Jonesand Sex and the City- or anticipating The Dark Knight Returnsand Prince Caspian- one big green kid has been left alone on the kitchen step. Don't you feel like taking the Hulk inside and giving him a cup of warm orange squash?

The problem is easy to identify. Whereas this summer's other monster releases include sequels to much-loved originals and (in the case of Iron Man) fresh versions of previously underexploited material, The Incredible Hulkarrives as the follow-up to a peculiarly botched oddity.

Ang Lee's Hulk(2003) did interesting things with the grammar of the comic book, but it was, ultimately, too eccentric for dedicated action fans and too crude for the high-brow contingent. And the Hulk himself looked bleeding stupid.

Universal has, accordingly, hired Louis Leterrier - a director best known for encouraging Jason Statham to batter other bald men with pickaxe handles - to deliver a less cerebral, more linear sequel. The result must be regarded a partial success. The Incredible Hulkhas a satisfying momentum that propels the audience through the opening hour without giving it time to consider the various idiocies littering up the story. Ed Norton, who usually thinks himself above such twaddle, makes a believable existential worrier of Bruce Banner, and the copious self-referential gags are amusing. But, sadly, the Hulk still looks bleeding stupid.

The movie begins some weeks after the chaos that closed Hulk. Banner, a research scientist, who, following a misguided experiment, habitually turns big and green when angry, has taken himself to a humble apartment in one of Brazil's busiest Favelas. Now a blue-collar worker in a bottling factory, he spends his free time learning techniques to control his hazardous temper.

Meanwhile, shouty Gen Thunderbolt Ross, whose daughter Betty once loved Banner, stomps about the Pentagon planning ways of recapturing the boffin and the martial potential that lurks within his altered metabolism. He sees his chance when Emil Blonsky, an even shoutier British officer, thumps his way into the foreground. Before long, the gang are in a helicopter on their way to South America.

The Incredible Hulkreally is a singular piece of work. Some commentators, having noted that the entire cast of the first film has been replaced, have gone so far as to describe it as a rebooting in the manner of Casino Royaleor Batman Begins. That argument doesn't really hold up. William Hurt's Thunderbolt and Liv Tyler's Betty may be, respectively, more patrician and more wooden than the versions created by Sam Elliott and Jennifer Connelly, but they remain recognisably the same characters.

What has changed, however, is the pacing and the tone. Leterrier, director of martial arts jamborees such as The Transporterand Unleashed, brings a post-Bourne zip to the chase scenes across the shantytown rooftops. One senses, indeed, a yearning on the director's part to stay with Banner and leave his emerald, computer-generated pal to his own furious devices.

Unsurprisingly for a film-maker whose previous feature starred Jet Li as a dog (sort of), Leterrier proves to be very much at home with the big stupid gag. When the star sits down at his computer, a Norton Utilities programme (forgivable product placement, for once) displays itself conspicuously on the screen. The cameos from Lou Ferrigno, star of The Incredible Hulktelevision series, and Marvel Comics supremo Stan Lee are genuinely funny. And the brief nod towards the TV show's famously mournful closing theme will draw a smile from all fans of a certain age.

So, everything's dandy then. Weren't you listening? The movie may have its merits, but the Hulk still looks bleeding stupid.

Writing in the New Yorker, Michael Chabon, a novelist with an obsessive interest in comics, recently pointed out how difficult it is for film-makers to represent the pseudo-naked curves and flexes of the superhero's body. Making sense of The Hulk, a fantastically unreal Golem in Marvel's original, has, once again, proved to be an even greater challenge for the computer wizards.

This version of the creature looks like a green gorilla with an apple where its head should be. He looks like the Frankenstein Monster after a spell at a health farm. He looks like Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons.

But, more than anything else, he looks computer generated. While watching the tediously extended final fight sequence, in which the beast goes up against Tim Roth's genetically mutated Blonsky, it proves impossible to evade the realisation that one batch of ones and zeros is walloping another with massively heavy algorithms.

So it's a passable Hulk movie featuring a useless Hulk. One thinks of the apocryphal anecdote concerning a reporter's question following Abraham Lincoln's assassination. "Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"