MILD IN THE STREETS.('The Hulk')('Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle')(Movie Review)

When Fay Wray was hoisted into the air by the love-struck ape in the original "King Kong," from 1933, she screamed and screamed in terror. Or was it excitement? There was a touch of lewd humor in the Merian C. Cooper-Ernest B. Schoedsack classic, and, for a full seventy years, making gleeful dirty jokes while watching the movie has been part of its myth and aura. In Ang Lee's "The Hulk," which is an amalgam of the King Kong and Frankenstein stories--and a linear descendant of the Marvel comic book and a so-so TV series--the scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) turns into a rampaging monster whenever he gets angry. Then Bruce--all fifteen feet of him, green, grotesquely muscled, and mostly naked--approaches his lab colleague Betty, who is played by Jennifer Connelly. This actress has become the mater dolorosa of the American cinema, forever deposing her men from their cross of suffering. (In "A Beautiful Mind," she gazed with compassion at a different kind of monster.) Connelly's Betty doesn't scream at Bruce's touch; instead, she keens with sympathy and woe, and, at that point, he shrinks to his normal self. This beauty-and-the-beast movie isn't a fable of mad passion; it's a fable of detumescence.

No one could ask the filmmakers, including the writers James Schamus, John Turman, and Michael France, to make the same joke that the creators of "King Kong" made. But without some sort of pop madness roiling around in the basement of the material--some kind of lawless impulse--a monster movie has very little reason to exist. If a man who turns into a behemoth isn't a metaphor for forbidden human desires, then what does he represent? Peculiar eating habits? It turns out that Lee and his collaborators have made an earnest and laborious picture about parent-child relationships (both Bruce and Betty struggle against their parents), thereby reducing fantasy to rational spectacle. "The Hulk" spends a great deal of time worrying about what lies in Bruce's unconscious, but the movie itself doesn't have an unconscious.

Which is not to say that Lee's high-mindedness always goes for naught. "The Hulk" is structurally a mess and unevenly made, but the first forty minutes or so are quite beautiful. Frederick Elmes, who shot "The Ice Storm" for Lee and "Blue Velvet" and other movies for David Lynch, creates a strangely entrancing palette for a desert Army base in the nineteen-sixties. At the time, Bruce is just a baby--a baby, however, with a mad military-scientist father who injected dangerous gene-altering serums into himself before Bruce was conceived. A traumatic event cuts Bruce off from blissful memories of his beautiful mom and his weirdly loving dad, and the last moments of his happiness are shot in the pinks, pale blues, and yellows of a child's birthday party--the colors of longing for childhood harmony and safety. Bruce's loss of memory, coupled with his genetic soup, makes him a repressed, brooding presence as a man.

The early moments in the lab, when Bruce is a grownup, are also crafted with great precision and beauty, and the quiet tones used by the actors are a surprising change from the usual big-budget overemphasis. Yet Lee punctuates the scenes in manipulative ways that make us wary: he throws seething nebulae onto the screen, sends clouds of invading blood corpuscles creeping across computer models, and relies on such dubious tricks as shock zooms--a sudden jerk back from, say, the eye of a frog, as if recoiling in fear at what might lie within the animal. All this zipping, whirling hash from the director of "Sense and Sensibility" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is intended, I suppose, to prepare us for the big moment when Bruce first swells into monsterhood--when the horror is released. But that moment is a disappointment. The Australian actor Eric Bana, with his hair falling across his forehead, has a slightly damaged look--we certainly get the idea that he's penned up--but when he grimaces and ...