The Incredible Hulk opens with a quick recap of everything you should know about the origin of The Hulk interspersed as silent clips through the title sequence. This puts a lot of faith in the audience, and I take it as a huge compliment that the filmmakers didn't waste a half hour of our time going through the origin again. Everyone should know how The Hulk came to be, or at least know that Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is a guy who turns into a giant, green monster.

The filmmakers use the Bill Bixby television series as its springboard. The Gamma Pulse Test that transformed Banner is set up exactly as the memorable one in the television 1978-82 series' titles. Other allusions to the series include the filmmakers replicating Bixby's hitchhiking in the rain, the use of "The Lonely Man" theme song, and, of course, a comedic reference to the most quoted line from the series. Most pleasing of these tie-ins is that Lou Ferrigno not only has a cameo as a security guard, but he even voices The Hulk.

The Hulk himself looks great and the scenes of The Hulk in action must be seen on the big screen, especially his battle with The Abomination. The Abomination, however, lacks something in his rendering and I can tell you exactly what it is. The creators of this Abomination decided to leave out the character's fin-like ears. This doesn't just come from being the fanboy purist I always have been. Aesthetically, The Abomination's head needs something going on. The rest of his body is covered with spikes and things, so the ears would not have been that much of a deviation from their design.

The first half hour or so following Banner in seclusion in Brazil is fantastic. It's not until the action goes over State-side that we realize the biggest flaw in the film: the dialogue is complete rubbish. The actors struggle with much of the dialogue, and some of the delivery of screenwriter Zak Penn's cliched drivel elicits a good deal of laughter. It's hard for me to comment on the performances of otherwise fantastic actors like William Hurt and Tim Roth when the script is so bad.  It would be unfair to criticize them for being given such sophomoric dialogue to work with.

Robert Downey Jr. makes an appearance as Tony Stark at the film's closing, alluding once again to The Avengers film, placing Norton's Banner securely in the cast for 2011. Unfortunately, Zak Penn, who also wrote such atrociously scripted super hero movies as Elektra, Fantastic Four, and X-Men: The Last Stand, is currently slated to write The Avengers, as well as a Captain America movie to pave the way for The Avengers. As pleased as I am to see Hollywood imitating Marvel's elaborate comic book universe in which these super heores veer in and out of each other's lives, it's sad to see Penn get all this work in the series and the writers of the far superior Iron Man get pushed aside.

Jef Burnham is a writer and film critic in Chicago.