Written by Zak Penn, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby
Directed by Louis Leterrier

This film doesn’t go back over what was covered in Ang Lee’s Hulk. It’s really more of a sequel to that film, although the actors have changed. The opening sequence reimagines some of those events in the earlier film with the new actors.

Edward Norton portrays Bruce Banner in this story. Liv Tyler is his love interest, Betty Ross. William Hurt portrays her father, General Ross, who is hunting Bruce down. The opening sequence also shows a quick clip that shows Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is keeping an eye on him.

Bruce has retreated to Brazil, in a remote and poor area. There’s a funny moment where Bruce is clicking through the channels on the television at his apartment and stops briefly on Bill Bixby in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Anyone after Gen-X will likely not grasp the significance of that.` He watches kids’ shows to try and learn the language. He has also taken steps to try and be able to control his anger and fear, which trigger his transformation into The Hulk. By day, he works in a soda factory. He’s really good at fixing the equipment. One time, while doing so, he accidentally cuts himself, and some of the blood ends up in the soda bottles.

Bruce has been trying to research ways of taming the alter-ego inside him. At the behest of an anonymous benefactor he has been working with, he tries another possibility that fails. His anonymous benefactor wants a sample of Bruce’s blood. Bruce is hesitant, but with nowhere else to turn, he mails him a blood sample. The man states he has promising results after testing the blood, but he needs to meet with Bruce.

General Ross traces Bruce through the contaminated soda and sends the military in after him. The plan is to tranquilize him and bring him in. Things don’t go as planned, and Bruce transforms into The Hulk in the middle of the chase. The attempts to shoot him with tranquilizers all bounce off.

Bruce awakens the next day in the forest near a waterfall. He learns he traveled all the way to Guatemala during his time as The Hulk. He continues to make his way north, hoping that the man he was working with has found a cure.

Back in the States, Bruce returns to the university where he once worked to try and get the data he needs. He spots Betty there. Bruce goes to visit an old friend who wants to help him. He disguises himself as a pizza deliveryman to gain entrance to the lab he once worked in. Unfortunately, the data he is looking for is gone.

General Ross has teamed up with a British agent, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who was part of the chase. Blonsky is intrigued by the experiment Banner was working on. It sounds almost like they were trying to recreate the serum that turned Steve Rogers into Captain America with the use of gamma radiation. Blonsky wants to try some of the serum himself and see what happens.

Betty spots him that night at the restaurant, although he runs off before she can find him to talk to him. Still, she manages to track him down, and they reunite. She had no idea what her father was really like until Bruce fills her in. She is with him the next day when the military closes in on him. He tells her to run. He attempts to get away, but they track him through the university. Betty follows them as well and knows her father is among the pursuers. Bruce manages to control himself until he sees one of the soldiers tackle Betty.

Blonsky lures The Hulk into a trap that uses sonic waves to knock him down. Thinking she is in distress, he gains the strength to knock them back. He also protects her when things go horribly wrong. Betty’s new boyfriend, Leonard (Ty Burrell), was the one who called in General Ross and now regrets it.

After nearly being killed by The Hulk, Blonsky makes a remarkable recovery. Even General Ross is amazed.

Bruce and Betty travel to New York City to meet up with the man he was communicating with. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) thinks he can cure Bruce. He administers the treatment, and it looks like it worked. Sterns then shows him the lab with all of the serums synthesized. Bruce wants to destroy it, and Sterns thinks he is being paranoid until the military closes in. Bruce doesn’t transform despite all that’s happening. Blonsky forces Stern to infuse him with what he took out of Bruce. The result is a creature much worse than The Hulk and no way to stop him.

There are so many small moments in this film that pay homage to the 1970s/1980s television show. It’s not just the cameo by Lou Ferrigno or Bill Bixby being shown on the television in his prior series. The music from that show was haunting, and it’s used here when Bruce is feeling particularly sorry for himself in Mexico. It sets the tone for him as a loner who has no one to turn to, as well as paying homage to the series.

There’s the Stan Lee moment where he appears as the person who drinks the contaminated soda. Lou Ferrigno has a cameo as well as the security guard at the lab.

Ed Norton was terribly miscast as Bruce Banner. It’s said that there were creative differences between him and the director and producers. I can believe it, as he just doesn’t deliver the role with the gravity that both Mark Ruffalo and Eric Bana brought to the role. I think the movie would have fared better with either of them in the role, but especially Bana. Ruffalo manages to bring a bit more levity to the role in more recent films, particularly once he embraces The Hulk rather than trying to get rid of him. Norton has the nerdy scientist quality to him that works, but I struggled with believing his moments when I should have been frightened of him.

I do think there was chemistry between Norton and Liv Tyler. I would have loved to have seen them act together. Tyler gives Betty a softness that makes her feminine, but there’s also an inner strength and loyalty to Bruce. She made me believe that Betty would never doubt Bruce. It’s a shame she didn’t pop up anywhere in the future Marvel Universe. I liked her quite a bit as a foil for her father as well as a love interest who could hold her own with Bruce. Imagine her meeting Natasha Romanov?

The CGI Hulk is a great character here. It seamlessly blends in with live actors. Ferrigno gives voice to the Hulk here, where Ruffalo will voice his version of Hulk in future Avengers films. Again, I think the problem was Norton. He couldn’t deliver a voice which could be considered firece and beastly. Even Robbie Benson would have worked (props if you know the connection).

William Hurt and Tim Roth are typical characters and really don’t stand out much. You have the corrupt military General who has his own reasons to want to get his hands on Bruce, and the mercenary who wants to become something much larger than himself. I wish they had spent more time on how this program was tied back to what happened with Captain America in The First Avenger.

It’s not a credit scene, but the movie ends with General Ross in a bar when he is approached by Tony Stark. This scene feeds into Stark’s meeting with Nick Fury at the end of Iron Man 2. I was expecting to see Nick Fury, but Tony Stark worked better due to how involved he’s been with the military. Still, you would think they would know that Ross i