NOTE that title. Hulk, not The Hulk, and there is nothing definitive about Ang Lee's unhappy marriage of wintry arthouse and summer blockbuster.

Hulk is a huge disappointment, a dull thud of a sci-fi folly already plummeting at the American box office, and sure to lumber to slumber here too.

The not-so-jolly green giant of the shirt-shredding cult TV series has staggered into the 21st century, from Stan Lee and Marvel beginnings to Ang Lee and the new cinema age of computer-generated imagery, although there is a whole heap of psychological foreplay before Ang lets his monster loose.

Where the likes of the Charlie's Angels and the Mission Impossible flicks go for instant impact, Lee is more like the slow-burning novelist, establishing character and motive through exposition, and damn anyone's lust for action.

First, Lee and his three writers - more than one is rarely a good sign - take an earnest eternity to set up two generations of the Banner science-obsessed family.

There's dad with his big moustache, beavering away at his risky genetic experiments, injecting himself with mutating material that alas is passed on to his son, Bruce.

Mum is killed, dad disappears, and all childhood memories are deleted like a computer file as quiet, self-contained Bruce (Australian Eric Bana) throws himself into his own laboratory research. His former flame (Jennifer Connelly) works with him, much to the wrath of her suspicious father (Sam Elliott), an army general putting him under scrutiny.

When the laboratory is sold to an unscrupulous industrial company, looking to exploits its research for dubious military purposes, at last the latent angry monster within Bruce gets the green light for go. What a letdown the computerised Hulk is: squat, bouncy, rubbery, he is more Toy Story cartoon than tragic comic-book hero and his kangaroo hops across the desert have none of the airborne elan of Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, nor the wonder of movement in Spider-Man.

Eric Bana's Bruce struggles to tame the beast within and to repeat the electricity of his eye-catching Aussie cult movie Chopper; Nick Nolte, as an older version of Bruce's dad, overacts yet again. Only Lee's use of split screens, a riff on comic-book design, shows any wit. This new green is not all the rage.

Updated: 12:00 Friday, July 18, 2003