Tienes algo mas stretchy?

“The Incredible Hulk” shares two important characteristics with its title character:  it is violent and stupid.  While the film boasts a few adrenal battle sequences that can get your heart pumping, even the Hulk’s gargantuan strength can’t bear the weight Zak Penn’s infantile screenplay.  In his childhood, Penn (who also “wrote” screenplays for “Last Action Hero” and “X-Men 3”) probably thought that setting his Matchbox cars on fire and driving them off the balcony was high art.  He hasn’t matured since.

The Hulk comic book was always at its best not as a superhero adventure but as a tragedy and allegory for mental illness and its consequences.  If there’s any hero at all it is the decidedly un-super Bruce Banner (played competently but with excessive restraint by Ed Norton Jr.), the scientist for whom The Hulk is no more than an extremely dangerous condition that can destroy his life and the lives of everyone around him.  But in the minds of our Hollywood overlords, we want superheroes, so into the superhero straightjacket Hulk goes.  And like the rest of his clothing, a straitjacket doesn’t fit the Hulk well -- can a steroidal colicky infant in a destructive blind rage really be heroic?

Actually, this CGI-generated Hulk has a head so small relative to the rest of his body that we can safely rule out PEDs.  Which is more than can be said for his nemesis, special ops solider Emil Blonsky (a laconic Tim Roth) who, with the assistance of a mono-maniacally obsessed General Ross (William Hurtt, also sedated), turns a secret army research project into his own private BALCO (kids, don't try this at home!).  It culminates in the de-gentrification of Harlem, as Hulk and super-Blonsky duke it out with cars and other impressively heavy objects.  All we need now is a Mitchell Report to tell us why it all went so horribly wrong.

The Incredible Hulk is playing pretty much everywhere.  Robert Downey Jr. makes a cameo appearance at the end of the movie which confirms my suspicion that Marvel is about to go into cross-over hell.