Reviews by johanlefourbe

Even though this movie has a rather lame reputation  (it is even considered by many as one of the worst super-hero features), I always had a weak spot for the damned thing and, in fact, I would even go as far as saying that it is one of my favorite movies in this genre. Indeed, even though Marvel has been incredibly successful with its MCU,  most of the movies in this franchise always follow the same generic and rather boring template and Ang Lee followed a different path which was, in my opinion,  much more interesting. Basically, he went for some kind of Greek tragedy as Bruce Banner got his powers from birth after his father did some experiments on himself and, to amplify the drama, his father killed by accident his mother in front of Bruce who became highly traumatized in the process. That was some heavy stuff and Marvel would afterwards always focus on some much ligther material staying away from such dark tales in the future which was just too bad. Furthermore, Eric Bana was actually pretty decent playing this conflicted character and, at least, he was physically not such a huge stretch from the Hulk, especially compared to Edward Norton who looked nothing like the green monster. Eventually, the only major issue with this movie and the major reason why this movie was widely dismissed was the fact that Ang Lee clearly didn't care much about the action scenes. Indeed, there were only a few of them, they were not really convincing at all and, to make things worse, the Hulk looked very often pretty ugly which was considered like a major offense for all the fans of the comic-book. Well, like Ang Lee, I didn't care much about these action scenes,  I thought he gave a really interesting portrayal of this character and, in my opinion, this flick must be the most underrated super-hero feature made so far.

I remember it quite well when this movie was released. Indeed, even though it wasn’t really a box-office failure, it was seriously destroyed by the critics. With this in mind, I wasn’t really expecting much from the damned thing but I thought I might as well give it a try. Well, first of all, to be honest, I really liked the concept and the whole thing definitely had some potential. Furthermore, I also really liked the fact that the main character was rather selfish and egocentric. Indeed, his behavior was far from being really heroic which was quite refreshing but this idea was not developed at all in the movie. On top of that, the whole story was eventually rather lame and the dialogues were even worse, I’m afraid. As  usual, everybody blamed Hayden Christensen but, in fact, I thought he was not bad at all in this movie. On the other hand, Rachel Bilson was not convincing at all but it was not entirely her fault. The main issue was more the fact that the whole romance between their characters was not interesting at all. Seriously, they could have looked for something more thrilling than that. Instead, you end up with a rather lame love story and this battle with the Paladins which was just really not developed enough and not really interesting either. To conclude, I don’t think it was not as bad as everyone seemed to think, there were actually some great ideas, the end result was just quite average but I still think is worth a look, in spite of its flaws. 

I had already watched this movie but since it was a while back and since I had it on DVD, I was quite eager to check it out again. Well, once again, I was quite impressed by the directing which was really solid and by Benecio del Toro who gave an amazing performance. Still, if the only flaw of the first part was that Che Guevara seemed rather flawless and the whole thing looked sometimes like a propaganda movie, this second part was actually too neutral in my opinion. Indeed, was it too bad that Guevara didn't manage to bring his revolution somewhere else or did he actually get what he deserved because he was maybe just lucky the first time around? Indeed, the whole thing never took side. Instead, it only focused on the facts and, as a result, in 2 hours, I still don't think that I have learn so much about the guy after all. Still, it was pretty neat how this second movie actually mirrored the first movie, showing how Guevara followed pretty much the same process and while it seemed to go rather well for a while, the outcome turned out to be dramatically different, especially for him. Anyway, in spite of its flaws, since I'm a sucker for (leftist) political movies, I thought it was still a really fascinating story and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested by this subject.