The Incredible Hulk.

Let me begin by re-iterating, for those of you who hadn’t yet observed this minor detail, that I am a sad Marvel Fan Girl. I’ll watch almost anything that comes from Marvel Studios and enjoy it. The flicker-flack at the start of any Marvel movie fills me with a sort of contented happiness, because I like mutant super-heroes. Why do I like mutant super-heroes? Gods know. If you ask one he might tell you. Then you can tell me. Answers on a postcard.

There are exceptions, however. X3 was a terrible mish-mash of wasted opportunity and somnambulant acting that was even more disappointing than the second Pirates film. It barely avoided being consigned to the same brain-bleach filled oubliette that houses Highlander 2, the apotheosis of movies belonging to the cinematic Room 101. Ghost Rider was memorable mainly for Nicholas Cage’s hair and air-brushed six-pack. Even so, I own both on DVD, I am that sad.

The entire Spiderman franchise is a melodramatic sequence of emo rubbish in which the super villains do an admirable job of attempting to raise the action out of the wangst-filled depths, but, lacking the necessary dirigible-sized lift, fail to do so. I don’t own any of these on DVD. Nor do I own a copy of the first Hulk movie. It was dull. It had a plot that would have disgraced the original TV series and tried to make up for it with special effects, which seemed, unreasonably, to make things worse.

What I’m attempting to explain is that I have standards. The Marvel flicker-flack may induce a temporary feeling of mild euphoria, but if the film is rubbish there is a come-down to rival the blood sugar crash experienced shortly after eating six packets of dextrose tablets.

Marvel have produced as many misses recently as they have hits. Iron Man was surprisingly good, even if I did have to wait until after the credits to achieve my long-felt desire to see Samuel L Jackson playing Nick Fury. It was thus with a mixture of feelings that I sat down to watch the sequel to the first Hulk movie.

Pre-warned that it started okay and then descended into a CGI musclefest, I at least had reasonably few expectations. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when it turned out that the director knew how to please the fans. Starting with a blatant nod to the TV series, the film carried on in the same vein, dropping enough canon references into the details to keep a sad fan girl like me happy.

“Did you see that box was addressed to D. Banner? Did you? He was called David in the TV series. Always wondered why they changed his name.”

Frood merely gave an indulgent sigh, but even he laughed at the purple stretchy trousers.

Edward Norton pulled off an admirably believable Bruce Banner. Not quite the shivery-lapdog, gutless obsessive that he can be in the comics: someone you could believe was capable of staying away from the military for five years and surviving while he tried to find a cure and learn to control the rage. The Health & Safety style “number of days since incident” captions were, I thought, a nice touch. They gave an idea of the same obsession without it having to be plastered all over the dialogue and characterisation.

William Hurt didn’t have to make much effort as General Ross, and Liv Tyler did her usual trick of looking pretty. Tim Roth’s Blonsky did, I admit, have me bemoaning the stale old trope of having an English actor play the bad guy, especially as in this case most of the bad guys were the American military. I like the grey morality of the people in the film we’re supposed to boo being the ones who are supposedly the most patriotic: I thought it was a bit of a cop-out to drop that in favour of a megalomaniac who had tasted power and wanted more. The world isn’t black and white, and Marvel have always been pretty good at striding up to that fact and meeting it head-on.

Although, now that I come to think of it, they don’t tend to do it so much in the movies.

A minor complaint, though, given what needed to happen for the big fight at the end. Of course there was a big fight at the end. It’s a truism: if you’ve got a super-powered lead, then you need to give him something big to fight, otherwise the conflict is unbalanced and this is an action film, not an arthouse movie. It’s not the sort of film where the makers can play with standard story-telling convention too much.

The CGI, as impressive as it was, managed not to overwhelm the rest of the film, as it did in the first one. The Hulk was given a degree of personality. He got to speak. He was given sufficient dialogue and progressive character development to make me wonder where they are taking him — and that, for me, was a pleasure. I like to speculate as to how they are going to tie the movies in with canon; and the Hulk, in the history of the Marvel Universe, has been so much more than the big green guy who is permanently pissed-off and is liable to destroy your house rather than admire the interior design.

And then there was the teaser near the end. I won’t spoil it for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, but here’s a clue: you don’t have to sit through the credits for it.

The Incredible Hulk is one of the hits. Not up there with X2, largely because of the way the morality shifts from greyscale to bipolar, but better than The Fantastic Four. I’d put it slightly below Iron Man because the latter had more of the humour that I like in my Marvel, the lack of which in the one franchise that bloody well ought to have it by the bucketload — Spiderman — is its major failure. There are enough references in there to keep the fans happy (certainly fans of a certain age) and enough action to keep everyone else entertained even if they miss the referential humour that has become a major part of good comic book screen adaptations.

I hope that Marvel are learning the lesson. The people who are likely to go to see their movies on spec are the fans. The people who are likely to want to own copies of the movies on DVD are the fans. Keeping the fans happy is the way they are going to make the most money, so in the movies they should keep at least some form of resemblance to the characters we know from the comics; and they should also remember that the comics have plot and balance and enough intelligence in their stories that adults read and enjoy them.

Adults know that the world isn’t morally bipolar, and that people aren’t superficial cardboard cut-outs defined solely by what others label them. Adults also like a really good scrap with plenty of explosions.

If recent offerings from the Marvel stable are anything to go by, including The Incredible Hulk, I don’t think that hope is groundless. Now come on. Teasers for Avengers aside, what are you going to do for all of us who see a rampaging monster terrorising New York and wonder why only one of the many supers who live there is doing anything about it?