And Another

Left off last week with a bit on Louis Leterrier’s* new Incredible Hulk flick. Leterrier won’t be returning to the Transporter series for installment #3. The new one (trailer’s out now) will be directed by bombastically self-named French ex-graffiteur Olivier Megaton.

Never made it to the second Transporter, but I had to grudgingly hand it to the first film. It’s tough to remember a film so completely willing to dispense with even pretending it cared about the plot in favor of moving on to the next action scene, which is both what you want and what you get when you hire Corey Yuen (compatriot of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, a 30-year vet action choreographer and martial artist/acrobat since childhood) to direct.

*Some years ago, I made a smarmy comment to a friend about Leterrier being obvious French for “the terrier,” which we both rightly dismissed as a pretty lowbrow gag, but you gotta think twice when you realize the guy made a movie called Danny the Dog (released as Unleashed in the US).

A word on The Incredible Hulk, if only due to its unusual status as not-a-sequel, not-quite-remake, not-quite-reboot. True, the different between remake and reboot (and whatever T.I. Hulk is) is tenuous at best, and often the number of years between projects is the only concrete-ish deciding factor. The other thing is a sort of general tenor – Casino Royale (2006) is universally considered a reboot, rather than remake or re-adaptation, despite multiple versions committed to film already.

With Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk (2008) so quick on the heels of Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), and the prevailing opinion on Hulk to be dismissive (to put it politely), Marvel needed to repackage the character to be palatable to general fans and, more importantly, packageable with the new Avengers wave they’re setting up. The new film would have to realign the potential Avengers audience’s thoughts of the Hulk so that they didn’t think of Eric Bana, or Ang Lee, or whatever exactly was happening there at the end of Hulk. I can’t think of another time when a studio asked an audience to please just forget the last one happened: filmdom’s first do-over?

The prevailing sentiment seems to be that the new one succeeds where the old one failed; not having seen it yet, I gather that this means “notably more action, slightly better computer graphics.” Despite what seems to be a huge gap in popular acceptability, there doesn’t seem to be much to distinguish between the productions, at least on paper. But don’t take my word for it – let’s go to the tale of the tape: