Ang Lee

From the Vault: Hulk, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eric Bana in Hulk

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

The Hulk is perhaps the first comic-book adaptation that could ever be labeled pretentious. What we have here is not your run-of-the-mill, formulaic action flick in which exposition takes a back seat to explosion – far from it. Instead, acclaimed director Ang Lee brings us a film that generally forgoes action, alternatively attempting to present a more stylish, sophisticated picture. He endeavors mightily to create complex characters and place them in an emotionally involving story. It’s an admirable effort, and it’s encouraging that Lee refuses to be bound by the usual confines of the genre. But he fails. And when someone with the cinematic stature of Ang Lee fails, he fails hard.

The problem with The Hulk is that it lacks a center. There is no focal point, no pivot upon which we can focus our attentions and concerns. Lee is so fixated on style and uniqueness that he overlooks his characters, none of whom is nearly as well-developed as he pretends. Thus, as the machinations of the storyline unfold, we are not intrigued but isolated, hopelessly disconnected from the film’s events. This, combined with a plodding pace, render the movie a lackluster journey that struggles just to keep our interest. Read More

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Gemini Man: Twice the Star Power, Quintuple the Speed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Will Smith (and Will Smith) in "Gemini Man".

There’s a reason that movies are classically referred to as motion pictures: They move. Silent or talkie, black-and-white or Technicolor, the quintessence of cinema over the past hundred-odd years is the collective experience of watching images in motion. In the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling imagined portraits wherein the subjects ceaselessly shift and budge, a clever conceit that also underlined just how miraculous real movies are. They’re magic brought to life.

Ang Lee has contributed more to this paranormal art form than most, in variety if not in volume. Over a startlingly diverse 12-year stretch (from 1995 to 2007), he made a Jane Austen period piece, an incisive family drama, a war picture, a martial-arts fantasy, a comic-book adaptation, a romantic weepie, and a political thriller. But in his late period, Lee has taken to tinkering with the machinery of the movies itself, to exploring new ways of beaming images onto a silver screen. His Life of Pi, while narratively and thematically flimsy, is one of the few films to make productive use of 3D; scenes of a young man traversing an ocean with a computer-generated tiger were gripping in their visual splendor. Then came Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which Lee shot not just in 3D but at 120 frames per second (five times the industry standard of 24), a useless flourish which disguised the fact that the movie was the most forgettable thing he has ever made. Rather than course correcting, Lee has now (ahem) doubled down on the gambit with Gemini Man. It’s an ambitious folly that might start cementing Lee’s unfortunate cinematic legacy, that of a once-gifted storyteller who became so obsessed with changing how movies look and move, he forgot to make them good. Read More

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