I feel like I’ve taken an inordinate amount of guff for looking forward to The Incredible Hulk. For starters I’ve been mercilessly taunted by the “Ed Norton is a prima donna artsy-fartsy asshole who should just shut up and make movies” brigade. Then there’s the “nobody cares about this movie, Iron Man has all the buzz, it’s the hippest happenin’est superhero movie around baby” fanboy-EW-wannabe contingent. And lately I’ve even got into it with a small army of people who prescribe to the absurd notion that Jennifer Connelly is more attractive than Liv Tyler. (The hell you say!) And oh yeah, some people just think it’s a mediocre movie.

Well ha ha ha ha ha, you’re all wrong! The Incredible Hulk was basically exactly what I was looking for in a Hulk movie. Three rock-solid action sequences that made tremendous use of their physical settings (the chase through the Brazilian urban sprawl was particularly stunning), with the consequences for the combatants easily parseable amid the CGI rubble. Terrifically vulnerable leads in Edward Norton and Liv Tyler–the former imbuing Bruce Banner’s every move with a sort of hangdog desperation that his life as a human being with anything to offer anyone is over, the latter using her breathy voice and just-wept eyes and lips to convey the awkwardness of running into someone you used to love as well as you’re gonna see in a movie. Moments of memorable, borderline-poetic action spectacle that more than make up for seeing the seams of the SFX–the savagery of the Hulk vs. Abomination fight is as strong as anything from the second and third Spider-Man films, which had some excellent, beautiful fights despite their other flaws.

Then there were little surprises–the sneak-attack emergence of the Mr. Blue character as a bit of a mad scientist, which really snuck up as organically as possible in a big Hollywood blockbuster. Moments of glamor and wit, like Tyler’s sultry tossing and turning, Norton’s weird breathing exercises, and the very funny “we can’t have sex or I’ll Hulk out mid-coitus” moment. And the biggest twist of all: The fact that this was more or less an Abomination origin movie, showing us Emil Blonsky’s journey from black-ops badass at the top of his game to a first-time loser obsessed with his defeat, at which point, enter superhero pseudoscience. That’s your superhero-movie origin structure in a nutshell, and here it’s used on background to cook up the antagonist. Clever!

I’m quite glad I saw it in a theater full of cheering, clapping people, in midtown New York City, at 5 o’clock on a Monday. It was a hoot, as good in its way as Iron Man, with those characters’ cleverness replaced by these characters’ awkwardness. It works.

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