The greatest sin for a comic-book movie adaptation such as The Incredible Hulk is for it to be average. But this is more of a disheartened plod down the path of least resistance than the building-pummelling riot of ideas that it needed to be. The Hulk has already failed to ignite as a movie franchise. Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), with its esoteric, sensitive approach, jarred with the primal joy of a pair of big green fists and a trail of devastation.

The approach in the new Hulk seems to be to avoid risks at all costs. The film is a generic trawl through well-worn scenes from other pictures. Chaos is yet again wrought in the streets of Manhattan. As in King Kong, a vulnerable woman is able to break through the brute rage of the monster and touch the sensitive soul within. Like the recent Iron Man, the protagonist is forced to do battle with his evil alter ego. Is there even a spark of freshness or originality in this tedious film? Well at one point Hulk tears a police car in half and fashions it into a pair of makeshift boxing gloves, but that’s about as far as it goes.

The cast is uneven. Tim Roth, as the “super soldier” Blonsky, snarls and spits his dialogue entertainingly, but Liv Tyler delivers her lines as if she’s recovering from a cranial trauma. Edward Norton, a decent actor, has the thankless role of Banner/the Hulk. He spends most of his time avoiding conflict and meditating studiously to keep his pulse down. But just as tensions begin to rise, his character morphs into a giant CGI lump of putty with an attitude problem. The CGI rendering of the Hulk in his full green glory is no more successful in this film than it was in the last – millions of dollars of computer software at their disposal and the best they can come up with is something that looks like angry Plasticine.

12A, 114 minutes

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