Expectation and product: ‘The Incredible Hulk’ and ‘The Happening’

It doesn’t take another look at Ang Lee’s widely reviled comic-book adaptation “Hulk” to understand the impetus behind Louis Lettier’s kinda-sorta follow-up “The Incredible Hulk:” taking the box-office criticisms to heart and agreeing that the original film was too slow and boring, the pseudo-sequel amps up the action to an incomprehensible degree, bypassing such needless amenities as “plot” and “character development” in order to ladle out the CGI goods as quickly as possible. You wouldn’t like Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) when he’s angry, because he turns into the titular green behemoth and, y’know, breaks a lot of stuff. But he may have met his match in Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), a never-say-die soldier who has a few too many chemical injections in the wrong places and turns into a spiked tumor called The Abomination—just the perfect super-villain into which our muscle-bound hero can pour his aggression and end the film with a slam-bang (read: LOUD) finish! And that’s more or less it. “The Incredible Hulk” is a film apparently made by committee, with a script written by audience reaction cards at test screenings, and subsequently pitched back at the lowest common denominator.

I mean, yeah, you can’t help but chuckle when the familiar “Lonely Man” theme from the old Bill Bixby TV show accompanies a sad montage, nor when Lou Ferrigno appears in his obligatory cameo. But there’s nothing else to these moments—hell, to this entire film—beyond waiting for them to happen and fulfilling that sense of level-one recognition. I know that the Hulk has always been a kind of big-man-break-things kind of character (“Hulk smash,” yes?), but doesn’t a two-hour film warrant a little more than that? Is this what the summer blockbuster has become—no longer larger-than-life spectacles tailored to our fascination of the silver screen, but a simplistic regurgitation with the expectation you will blindly lap up what you’ve already seen a thousand times before? The fact that Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark escapes from his own far superior movie to appear in the last scene and further set up the inevitable Avengers flick (coming in 2011; mark your calendars) should tell you everything you need to know about “The Incredible Hulk:” sucking from the bones of past successes while simultaneously promising that there are, like, totally awesome things to come, the movie can’t be bothered to come up with anything new or original in the here and now. Because that’s what you want, right?

Frankly, I’ll take a glorious failure like M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” over insulting populist garbage like “The Incredible Hulk” any day. Where “The Incredible Hulk” tries too hard to please as wide an audience as possible, “The Happening” couldn’t care less what you think—which makes it the strangely admirable afterbirth of the director’s bile-spewing trainwreck, “Lady in the Water.” In what may be an attempt to imitate one of George Romero’s apocalyptic scenarios (closer to “The Crazies” than to any of his zombie pictures), a natural airborne chemical is quickly spreading across the Northeast, prompting the infected to violently commit suicide; the film revolves around high school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his awkward wife (Zooey Deschanel, who gets a lot of mileage out of those kaleidoscope irises of hers) as they attempt to escape the affected area and maybe figure out what the hell is going on. Only problem being that there are certain phenomena that will always exist beyond humanity’s limited grasp—including what was going on in Shyamalan’s mind as he threw his characters into one mad scenario after another. But I’m somewhat astounded that “The Happening” was made at all: it takes no shortage of guts to make a horror film in which the protagonists attempt to outrun the wind and offer paranoid monologues to plastic plants, all in service to a screed on how the human race is nothing more than a race of vile, polluting invaders. Stiff and improbable (yet still better than “The Mist”), “The Happening” is hardly the kind of film from which you should take serious philosophical advice, but it must be seen to be believed; Shyamalan is a madman with a vision that must be realized, and there’s nothing you can do to stop him.