Two giant green monsters face off in a Mexican jungle. He’s wearing glasses and a button-down shirt; she has a mane of blow-dry perfect hair that even non-monsters would kill for.
As they lay waste to the surrounding ecosystem, boulders fly, trees are snapped like matchsticks and one of them gets clobbered by an open-top Jeep. It’s a scene of such shamelessly silly campiness that I wasn’t sure whether to cheer or groan in despair. Unfortunately, Disney+’s latest Marvel offering, She-Hulk, doesn’t seem to be entirely sure how far to lean into it either.
The show’s protagonist, Jennifer Walters ( the titular She-Hulk) is the cousin of Bruce Banner, a hotshot lawyer who inherits Banner’s propensity for turning green when some of his blood accidentally infects her after the two are involved in a car crash. As a result, she’s now the She-Hulk, who’s trying to hold down her job while managing her magnified Hulky rage and dealing with a host of troublesome super-powered clients, one of whom is managing the parole hearing for the Abomination (Tim Roth), who made his first and only appearance in the first Hulk film.
Walters (Tatiana Maslany, best known for her work on Orphan Black, where she plays pretty much everybody in it) makes regular asides to the camera, protesting that it’s her show, a show about lawyers rather than superheroes – though she concedes that we’re all desperate to see Doctor Strange’s Sorcerer Supreme, Wong, make a cameo appearance. This Fleabagging has its origin in some of the later She-Hulk comic books in which Walters regularly breaks the fourth wall to talk to the reader but here, instead of coming off as quirky and knowing, it rapidly becomes desperately cringey.
The very talented Maslany does her best with the role, embracing the silliness with a twinkle in her eye that suggests she’s in on the joke. The scenes where she butts heads with Mark Ruffalo’s Banner are charming, as are his attempts to get her to train and manage her inner Hulk – which, as you might expect from an over-achiever, she proves to be rather better at than him.
The storyline itself is a bit more muddled: some shadowy organisation is on the hunt for She-Hulk’s blood (presumably to do dastardly things with it, though nothing much happens regarding this in the first four episodes); Jen gets fired after turning into a Hulk during a court hearing as the Deputy District Attorney; Jameela Jamil pops up as supervillain Titania, who is apparently in need of legal assistance. It’s all fun but it’s hard to see where all this is going.
Still, the CGI isn’t half bad, with Maslany’s She-Hulk looking less uncanny valley than I expected – though why her curls morph into a just-stepped-out-of-the-salon luscious mane when she transforms is anybody’s guess. If they could bottle that they’d make a fortune.
The real problem here is tone. At every turn, She-Hulk seems to feel obliged to shoehorn in a slice of gender politicking: Maslany gets hit on outside a bar by some random, “won’t take no for an answer” men; she declares that managing rage is “every woman’s base level for just existing”; she explains that being a woman in a man’s world is just like being a superhero in a world of normal people. It all makes sense but could it not have been done with a bit more elegance? While watching her lay waste to said thugs is satisfying in a primal female kind of way, after the third or fourth time it comes up, it feels like this lady, and her show, is just protesting too much. This isn’t by any stretch the first female-led superhero property, so why does it feel the need to lean into it with such heavy handedness?
She-Hulk won’t change the world. Indeed, it’s not even a particularly notable addition to the MCU. However, it is a slice of ridiculous fun. Just don’t think about it too hard.
