ive years after the pretentious "Hulk'' crashed and burned, "The Incredible Hulk" aims for much lower aspirations - basically at fans of the comic book and the TV series - as the studios wantedd to "reboot" the story and start afresh.

Director Louis Leterrier (Transformer, Unleashed) wisely doles out the origin aspects of the story underneath the opening credits - depicting the experiment gone wrong that causes Dr. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) to transform into the massive, green-skinned Hulk when angered.

With that out of the way, the current story begins with fugitive Banner, on the lam in a Rio de Janeiro slum practicing biofeedback to harness the creature within by controlling the temper that unleashes it and searching for a cure. He knows that if he gets angry, if his heart rate gets up to 200, he will turn into a tremendous green muscle man and start taking apart everything and everybody.

When a colleague hits on a cure, Banner heads back to the States and his microbiologist girlfriend Betty (Liv Tyler) - and straight into a trap set by her army general dad (William Hurt), who’s been obsessively searching for Banner for the last five years; he's been hoping to turn the green beast's gamma-radiated blood into a weapon that can be injected into test subjects for the army’s “Super-Soldier” program.