BIG IDEAS TEMPER COMIC-BOOK SILLINESS IN 'HULK'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THE ODD BUT intriguing ``The Hulk'' can't stop hurling its split personalities in our faces.

Appropriate enough for a movie adaptation of Marvel Comics' favorite Jekyll-and-Hyde hero, a passive scientist who turns into an aggressively muscled monster when he gets upset. But the deeper schizophrenia here grows out of art house director Ang Lee's attempt to make serious cinema out of a sci-fi action extravaganza.

The fit can be quite awkward at times. But the effort is admirable. Even when it's not working, it's almost always interesting.

Except, of course, when matters just become too silly for the solemn tone set by Lee (who made a similar ploy work beautifully for the elevated pulp of ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'') and screenwriters James Schamus, John Turman and Michael France. The ridiculousness comes just as often from elements in that script itself as by the sight of electric green computer-generated images zipping across the screen, tearing up everything in their path while trying to evoke character.

The most pleasant surprise is that, while the all-CGI Hulk can't help looking like a gym-ratted Shrek in some shots, there are any number of scenes in which you really buy the huge critter as a feeling, semi-thinking entity. The emotional content of these quieter moments may be ludicrous from the get-go, but that just makes their believability even more impressive.

The movie's origin scenario sticks fairly close to the one Stan Lee whipped up 41 years ago. Bruce Banner (played as an adult by Eric Bana, an Australian comedian who was chillingly effective as a real-life homicidal nut in the movie ``Chopper'') is a bottled-up scientist doing research into something called nanomeds at a Berkeley laboratory. This stuff apparently combines chemistry, biology and gamma radiation. His co-worker, Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly), used to be his girlfriend, but when she couldn't get Bruce to open up, their relationship became strictly business.

I'm not sure Bana gets across the emotionless aspect of Bruce's personality. But he doesn't need to, since the film is top-heavy with prologues, flashbacks and other references to the traumatic childhood that made him that way.

But we are here to learn. It seems Bruce's father, David - a truly nutty professor - performed experiments that passed the mean green gene onto his unsuspecting boy. All it takes is for Bruce to get zapped by a few gammas, then to get perturbed, to activate the transformation into various plus sizes of angry, unstoppable muscle. His real dad, who comes back into the foster-raised Bruce's life at this point, is terrifyingly overplayed by Nick Nolte. No wonder junior turns several shades of chartreuse any time the cracked old man tries to bond.

Another representative of the troublesome older generation is much more subtly limned by Sam Elliott. Imparting surprising sensitivity and nuance to a character named Gen. Thunderbolt Ross, Elliott suggests the regrets of a careerist father (he and daughter Betty don't talk much) while wasting immense amounts of the Army's resources ineffectually trying to keep the Hulk in check. But even this crusty old warrior comes to realize that the only way to really stop the Hulk is to dragoon his resentful offspring into the effort.

Lotta issues, huh? In fact, laying them all out takes up the first several reels of the movie. But when things finally do get green and smashing, Lee and ILM certainly prove generous with the spectacle. Hulk busts up Bruce's lab beautifully. Makes a mess of Bruce's lovely Craftsman home, too. There's a nighttime forest battle with monstrous Hulk dogs. And all of this before he's even captured, breaks out of a massive underground military facility, tears up half the Mojave Desert and San Francisco's Lombard Street ... and we still haven't reached the really wild finale.

And there is still more. Before the superhero action starts, Lee keeps things visually lively by slipping lots of creepy biochemical imagery into his montage. Then he tries to redefine montage itself by dividing the screen into multiple panels that display the action from an assortment of angles and viewpoints. This kinetic comic book layout scheme sounds better than it works; the effect is more often distracting than an enhancement to the film's narrative or themes.

But like so much about ``The Hulk,'' the very fact that Lee pushes this idea so hard and so imaginatively tends to power it past our usual notions of good and bad moviemaking. Any summer blockbuster entertainment this weird gets points just for being the extreme, unwieldy creature that it is.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

THE HULK - Three stars

(PG-13: violence, language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Nick Nolte, Josh Lucas.

Director: Ang Lee.

Running time: 2 hr. 17 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Bizarre but interesting effort to turn the story of Marvel Comics' monster hero into a psychologically resonant Greek tragedy.