The Somewhat Ambitious

“You’ve been levelling all day. Haven’t you.”

Remember Ang Lee’s spin on The Hulk, with Eric Bana? Remember finding it hard to watch Jennifer Connelly without visualizing that last scene in Requiem for a Dream? Remember thinking how much better a film you could have made? Well, in regards to that last point, Louis Leterrier got his wish. And we got vomit.

We also got part two in a cavalcade of crowbarred recruitment scenes, paving the way for The Avengers film. I have to confess at this point that i’m a monumentally big DC fan, following pretty much all the big (and many of the small) trades, as i find Marvel a bit like having sherbert forced under my eyelids, then being drowned in chocolate. Like that fat kid Augustus from Willy Wonka, sans Gene Wilder. That’s right, Marvel is (for me) like being violated with various confections then suffocating in a river tended to by orange midgets. The Marvel/DC rivalry is, at it’s most obvious, like comparing David Lynch to Tim Burton. One is a genius, and one is a monumental dick who compulsively casts his wife in everything he does.

I’m not saying Marvel doesn’t get it right. They get it right remarkably often, but the reason any superhero mythologies and subsequently evolving narratives work is because the people helming them make the best of what they have. Some are harder to fudge than others, although at some point even the greats have been forced to squeal like pigs. Case in point: The Hulk. Mild mannered Bruce Banner is turned into a chartreuse leviathan bristling with ennui (fuck you, I’m a film student. You picked medicine, you live with medicine). But after a placid opening, about two hours of fairly bland CG and a script blander than a wet hat, the scene i actually went for comes on.

The above trailer contains all the bits which make up the “recruitment” i mentioned earlier. At the end of Iron Man, Sam Jackson propositioned Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., perhaps the only man to play Charlie Chaplin and Iron Man. Perhaps.) and mentioned “the avenger project”. So far we have an arms dealer with a robot suit and a bounding green idiot whose most recent film was like having an umbrella opened inside oneself. The Thor film is slated for release, Spiderman 3 was about half as good as The Lakehouse, Captain America isn’t exactly PC given the political climate at present… are we starting to see a pattern? All i’m saying is this. If every one of those characters end up onscreen together and the film somehow manages to work, i’ll let my little cousin Matthew punch me in the balls.

(Matthew is seventeen).