The other thing I know about comic books

It seems that The Incredible Hulk doesn't take itself too seriously. Bruce Banner, on the run from the US military, works in a bottling plant. Not the best place for a rampaging beast man thing to work. And it manages to solve the trousers mystery - they're stretchy, very stretchy. The danger with all this is that, after all the good work done by the writers, there's just a big silly green man bounding around at the centre of the film. At first they're not keen to show him. He smashes things in the shadows of the unfortunate bottling place and occasionally growls a bit. It's easy to think they're scared of the reveal, but later on, when he's shown off completely, it's done confidently and unapologetically. It's found the right balance between physicality and cartoon flimsiness. And they don't overdo it, managing to calm down like Banner himself and suppress the Hulk until it's needed. Towards the end, when another scaly monster starts running around New York like Godzilla (there's a film that never got a sequel) it all starts to look a bit more expensive. Fair enough really. It doesn't try to do anything special, but what it does it does well.

The other day I wrote that most comic films are 'fun but formulaic'. This probably fits into that. Nothing surprising happens, but that's alright. It's the three-star film that you can't complain about. Again, I have no idea how it compares to the original work, and I still don't think it matters. In fact, I care so little about that I don't know why I just wrote it. Although, in a rare piece of comic book knowledge, I assume Robert Downey Jr. turning up at the end has something to do with the upcoming Joss Whedon film. I know these things.