Rating: 2 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
The cool thing about the Hulk is that you don’t really need continuity. I’m mostly unfamiliar with the Hulk TV series this movie is a follow-up to, and have no idea where the character was left at the end of it, but I don’t need to know that, because any Hulk story can start with Bruce Banner, anywhere in the world, trying to live a quiet, anonymous life, hoping he never becomes the Hulk again. This movie opens with Dr. Banner posing as Dr. Bannion (brilliant disguise), working at something called the Joshua Lambert Institute in California, dating one of his co-workers, and putting the finishing touches on an invention called the “gamma transponder”, which will create free energy somehow, but may also be able to cure him of being the Hulk. And not only that, it’s also a weapon or something? Either way, Joshua Lambert’s jealous younger brother, Zack, gets in league with a bunch of Cajun ne’er-do-wells, who will steel the transponder in order to get… money? From someone else I assume? I don’t know, it was all very confusing.
But none of that matters because really this movie is about Thor, and whether people would like to watch a TV show about Thor. One of Banner’s old college students, Donald Blake, on an expedition in Scandinavia, felt compelled to explore an ancient cave. There he found a hammer, which resurrected an ancient king named Thor, who had been cursed by Odin to be kept out of Valhalla until he did an unspecified number of good deeds. Unlike in the comic, Donald Blake and Thor are two separate people who can exist side-by-side. Because of Blake’s possession of the hammer, he’s Thor’s babysitter, and he can send Thor to and from some kind of limbo realm whenever he wants. Even though Blake doesn’t know Banner is the Hulk, he tracks him down at the Institute to ask for help figuring out what to do with Thor, somehow intuiting that Banner might have some opinions about dealing with unwanted supermen.
Soon enough Banner’s girlfriend is kidnapped by the Cajuns, and Hulk and Thor must work together to rescue her. The Cajuns are really quite bad at villainy, and for some reason they shoot Zack before they have the transponder or any money, yet somehow fail to actually kill him, so he has plenty of time to confess on his deathbed and tell Banner where they’re hiding out. Hulk and Thor arrive on the scene, knock some things over, and grab a lot of people and throw them (the go-to move for superheroes in this era and on this budget), before wrapping their leader up in a big piece of metal. Though you can start a Hulk story anywhere, generally they all end the same way: Though he’s truly in love, Banner must walk on alone and find a new place to hide out, fearing the exposure from this incident has been too much for him to continue to remain anonymous.
Best Parts:
Bill Bixby is a good Banner. It must be pretty wild to be such a big dude, like Lou Ferrigno, that you can just take your shirt off and be the Hulk. He’s pretty scary looking, too, even if he mostly just does the same flex repeatedly whenever he’s on screen. Though I especially liked Eric Allan Kramer, who played Thor, and was not surprised to see had a long and fairly successful acting career after this, including recently playing Scott on the short-lived series Lodge 49. His performance was charming and actually had some nuance I wasn’t expecting.
I could absolutely imagine a pretty decent Thor TV series coming out of this. Granted I probably wouldn’t watch it nowadays, just like I’m not going to go back and watch all the episodes of Incredible Hulk, but if I’d come across it growing up in the late 80s/early 90s, I likely would have. It would’ve been a good companion to other stuff I was watching then like The Greatest American Hero.
Worst Parts:
This is a TV movie from the late 80s, through and through, and it’s not terribly exciting to watch now. The plot is so generic as to be incomprehensible, and is just an excuse for there to be people who make the Hulk angry. Where did the bad guys get a police helicopter anyway?
I was so disappointed when Banner was easily able to lift and inspect Thor’s hammer. For as much as I liked Thor, he doesn’t seem to actually be much of a Thor. They say he was an ancient king, but then he refers to himself once as the son of Odin, and yet doesn’t seem to have any powers beyond being a large, strong man with enhanced senses (for some reason). Is he a stronger man than you’d expect a man of his size to be anyway? Eh, not really.
Superhero Movies Ranked 