it has become the norm to treat that movie as one the all-time worst. why? I caught it on TV last year or so, and was quite impressed with it. not perfect, but then few movies are.

The script never lived up to its ambitions, and had no interest in in living down to the kind of entertainment it eschewed in pursuing those ambitions; its Freudian complexity never quite gelled, and it didn't even really try on the action front.

Lee both helped and hurt matters by directing the whole thing as if it were an art film. The whole thing was beautiful, lyrical, and fanciful . . . everything you DON'T necessarily want a comic book movie--or at least a superhero movie, if I can make that distinction--to be.

But I still found the thing sad, heavy, and strangely affecting. Bana was note perfect, and the fact that the beast essentially functioned as a tantrumic infant was poignant and cathartic for me. Lord knows I've had my days when I wanted to throw a tantrum that involved throwing tanks.

That said, Leterrier's film Unleashed (the European cut was called Danny the Dog) is both my favorite English-speaking Jet Li movie and one of my favorite action movies of the last decade; and while there's little to recommend The Transporter (except for fans of martial arts sequences and Jason Statham, both of which are well featured; I enjoyed it on those bases), and almost nothing to recommend in its sequel, Leterrier is tangentially connected by those films with the folks who brought us District B-13, which is the best pure adrenaline rush I've seen in the last couple summers.

So I have some hopes for the sequel. I think Norton's a fine stand-in for Bana, even though I'll miss that soulful Aussie; the rest of the cast actually strikes me as an improvement on the first crew.

That said, The Dark Knight is the superhero film I most anticipate this summer; Batman Begins was, in my opinion, the best superhero movie ever (and I really don't believe I'm being hyperbolic).

I have to agree on Batman Begins, but I never understood the critical panning of Hulk, or the outsized praise for Spidey 2 myself, I found both to be flawed, but Hulk was slightly more interesting.

The Ang Lee's Hulk movie is better on the second viewing than the first. As an old time Marvelmaniac, I appreciated that Nick Nolte was the Absorbing Man, though I did not think the whole Daddy issue was relevant to the Hulk's origin. It was a good beginning, and Sam Elliott as Thunderbolt Ross was perfect. William Hurt doesn't do badly in the new movie, though. I had forgotten that he can act. Edward Norton has Bruce Banner down because in the comics he is a wimp. "Puny Banner!"

People who panned the CGI in Hulk while praising the CGI in the Spiderman franchise apparently saw different movies than I did. I enjoyed the first two Spiderman flicks (the less said about the third, the better, though I'll grant, at least, that it was better than the third X-Men movie--Brett Ratner simply shouldn't be allowed to direct), but I found the CGI cartoonish and unconvincing. The best thing about part 2 was Alfred Molina, in my opinion one of the most underappreciated actors in all cinema.

I think Hulk was aiming for a higher level of psychological complexity. I don't dispute that it failed to hit the mark, but an interesting, ambitious, artful failure is always going to be more interesting to me than a facile bullseye.

I think Hulk did hit that higher level of complexity. As I said in a latter posting, Ang Lee & Eric Bana's take on Banner/Hulk was very poignant (Ang Lee had said that his idea of repressed anger stemmed from his personal experience in Taiwan where artistic careers are looked down upon compared to more traditional careers in the sciences).
It was because of this strong suppressed anger that made becoming the Hulk cathartic, lending credibility to the idea that anger is a vital emotion. One of the greatest scenes is Bana describing to Jennifer Connelly what it feels like to completely lose control.
When we talk about failure in that movie, we're talking financial failure, which it was. The movie lost a lot of people because of the pacing- at 2 and a half hours, we don't get to see the Hulk until 30 mins. in. Spiderman came close to doing the same thing but I think because of its humor and being more of a teen-orientated character, kept more people engaged (I'm referring to the masses, I don't think cinephiles had the same take).
Finally, on a production aspect, Hulk's editing was groundbreaking at the time (the use of cgi to make each transition a collage) and the score was by Danny Elfman, people.

personally I disliked it because of the change to his orgin. now while intellectually I can accept that bioengineering is the "new nuclear" I simply did not like how it came off..