You wouldn't like me when I'm hungry," says Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) near the start of The Incredible Hulk, comically mangling a signature line as he tries to speak Portuguese to some menacing co-workers at a soft-drink bottling plant in Brazil.
Of course, comic-book fans love the Hulk when he's angry - and love a franchise when they feel it's hungry for success, which the Hulk movie series now officially is.
After sanctioning the turgid 2003 Ang Lee version of the myth (simply called The Hulk) about the scientist turned by gamma radiation into an uncontrollable angry green giant, Marvel Entertainment, in the second production by Marvel Studios (the first: Iron Man), has taken it back to its gnarly roots.
Lee tried to make the equivalent of an upscale graphic novel, with a family drama more fitting for the House of Atreus than the House of Marvel. He got caught in an untenable origin story and never exploited the exhilarating questions of the comic: Is the Hulk man or monster or both, and can Banner use his dual identity for good?
Luckily, the new The Incredible Hulk is more like those 80-page special issues that comic-book publishers sold in the early 1960s for a quarter, packed with old, favorite story lines.
A ticket will cost eight or nine dollars, not 25 cents, but this movie will give true believers their money's worth. It's hit or miss - yet when a legendary figure like the Hulk hits, the impact is startling, and even when he fans, he generates gale force.
Unifying it (just barely) is the stirring quest of the idealistic Banner to find an antidote to the poisoning that makes him transform into the Hulk in states of excitement or stress. Adorning it (and sometimes weighing it down) is a Beauty and the Beast subplot with Liv Tyler as Banner's former partner-lover, cellular biologist Betty Ross (Liv Tyler). She can recognize the palefaced geek within the dirty-emerald body that's as potent as 300 Spartans rolled into one.
A parallel quest comes from the U.S. military. Betty's father, General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt),and his ace special operative, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), aim to hunt the Hulk down and extract his essence to create a new breed of super soldiers.
But as the comic-book come-ons used to say, "Wait, there's more" - such as the emergence of another gamma-bred mutation, the Abomination, with spiky bones protruding from his flesh.
