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.

From there, the rest of the movie is essentially an extended chase, as Banner finds his way back to Betty in America to continue his search for a cure and the military always nipping at his heels.

When the action drops in, it's blatantly CGI but with more real-world heft than anything in the last half of Indy 4. The Hulk himself looks more steroidal than superheroic, as if the expressive beast from the first film had been replaced by a crazed wrestling star.

Director Leterrier manages to inject the action with a megadose of style, and Kurt Williams's visual effects wizardry makes the final showdown a thundering battle of musclebound titans. Credit must go to Norton (who pulls double duty, co-writing the film with Zak Penn) but also to director Louis Leterrier, for his intelligent sense of proportion. Leterrier reportedly wanted a more angst-y movie to emerge from the editing room, but ends up as a broody, moody action movie that never quite gets the blood boiling.

The result is not as good as "Iron Man" and there are plot holes, but it's an action movie in that style, willing to take its time and take advantage of the fact that it has a first-rate actor at its center. This "Hulk" may not be a certified smash, but as a popcorn movie steeped in action, it keeps our attention.