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The biggest thing that knocked the live-action Hulk projects off-course is the general audience's expectations mixed with a general misunderstanding about what the character represents.
Since he's been an Avenger sometimes, people often mistake Hulk as a "super-hero character" even though he's really not. "Crusading Do-Gooder" isn't really the gimmick; Hulk is a tragedy/horror story specifically based off of Jekyll and Hyde along with traditional werewolf folklore. He originally only got lumped into the Avengers comics due to Marvel Comics suffering financial problems at the time, and he never quite fit in with the rest of them, which is occasionally a story point.
The character isn't supposed to be such comic relief, but since that's what people expected from the MCU version based on pretty much every character being comic relief, that's what we have, but it undercuts the character's potential. Not as much as the studio nonsense that prevents another solo film from ever happening, which is some real piss.
As imperfect as they are, only the Lou Ferrigno TV series and the Ang Lee movie really tried to get past the superficial parts of the character and into the psychological horror it was based on. Unfortunately, the CGI in the Lee version was so terrible it prevents anyone from seeing past it and appreciating the many things it got right, and furthermore, nobody wants to see a "psychological horror" movie about someone they *think* is a conventional super-hero. You can tell them all day long that Hulk is no more a "super-hero" than Lobo, but they aren't going to get it.
There still hasn't been a Hulk movie that really gets it all together in a satisfying way, and that's a shame, because I feel that it's one of the more versatile Marvel characters. You *can* do conventional super-hero stuff with him, but you can also do lots of other things that wouldn't work with other characters. You can do horror, drama, chase movies like "The Fugitive", just about anything, really. But since they can't make a solo film anytime soon, he's stuck as a bit-player, which is the last thing he should be, and definitely limits the type of stories they can tell.
Lee's film nailed the story and the tone, but the CGI was just awful. Norton's was a fun, if rather typical super-hero romp, with much better special effects but it tried a little too hard to be a crowd-pleaser and some of the jokes don't land as a result, and the cast of the Ang Lee version was far superior, so while everyone in the Norton version was serviceable, it still felt like a step backwards.
To be fair, when you start with Sam Elliot, pretty much anything else is a step backwards, and that's not anyone's fault. Sam Elliot!
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