Hogan Reviews

So the much talked about She-Hulk MCU debut finally arrives and it’s a comedy show, complete with sitcom tropes and fourth wall breaks (very in character, comic-wise for the record!) while sprinkling in a few important cameos to make sure everyone knows that is still very much an entry in the overall saga. Well… apart from that ending, yesh. Didn’t like that at all… Erm, anyway, I’ll get to that in spoiler bit at the end of the review, either way let’s take a look at the series proper!

The premise is simple, in a crazy comic way: Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) is a regular lawyer who ends up turning into a Hulk like her cousin Bruce Banner but manages to land a job leading the first Law Firm dedicated to super-human related crimes. It worked in the comics and for the most part it works here. At nine half-hour episodes it doesn’t outstay its welcome and the humour lands more than it misses, with Tatiana being particularly great in the role even if some of the CG effects of her as She-Hulk aren’t fantastic. Thankfully the origin here makes more sense than the comics as instead of giving his cousin a blood transfusion despite knowing the potential problems they’re both in a car accident and Bruce’s blood accidentally enters her body. Bruce then takes her to a retreat to help her control her powers and makes a significant appearance towards the end of the show too, so fair play to Mark Ruffolo for reprising his role for a TV series (or Streaming Series, I guess?)

Oh man, it’s like she’s looking straight at you! …. Oh wait, that’s the joke. Never mind.

Sadly a lot of Jennifer’s co-stars are just not as memorable and fall into really dull work-place sitcom roles, with Nikki Ramos (Ginger Gonzaga) being the excitable out-going type who is obsessed with Jen’s love life, Augustus “Pug” Pugliese (Josh Segarra) being the more immature and gullible “new guy” type and Mallory Book (Renée Elise Goldsberry) being the more stoic rival lawyer who slowly warms up to her new colleague a bit. None of them were memorable and at least two of them were often annoying. Then again US sitcoms have never been my thing (beyond Friends due to growing up at the time it was everywhere and Frasier, which is a different kind of sitcom, not that I’ve watch either in YEARS) so maybe its just this brand of humour not being my thing, so you milage may vary.

Jennifer and She-Hulk’s big rival for the show is Mary MacPherran, otherwise known as Titania (Jameela Jamil) who unlike the generic muscle-headed woman from the comics is an extremely obnoxious “social media influencer” whose image as the world’s strongest woman is threatened by the new green-skinned lawyer. She works as a villain due to how easy it is to hate her, but I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not… Also featuring is Tim Roth returning as The Abomination, or Emil Blonsky now he’s able to control his transformation. He goes up for parole and wants Jennifer to represent him, actually rightfully claiming that the US government was the one who injected him with serum in the first place and sent him down that path. He actually gets off and sets up a peaceful retreat in the mountains, which was good for a laugh, fair play to Roth he went full-on with the more jokey role and nailed it.

Titania makes a dramatic entrance! I assume she won’t play a big role in the film version of Secret Wars like her original counterpart did in the comic version…

The series also sees plenty of cameos and new obscure characters from the comics, like Wong (Benedict Wong) from Dr. Strange, and the debuting Leap-Frog (Brandon Stanley) who is trying to set himself up as a crime fighter but doing a bad job or it, and even the Wrecking Crew, four convicts who have Asgardian-powered tools appear, I remember them from a random comic I had growing up, so that was funny (even if they bore very little resemblance to the comics, but when they’re that obscure, who cares?). The big one though is the full on costumed debut of Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock / Daredevil in the MCU. He starts off confronting She-Hulk but soon befriends both Jennifer Walters and her heroic alter-ego and even going on a street-thug beating warehouse raid with her. The role was moulded around the light-hearted sitcom side so it’s a different portrayal than the Netflix series to say the least but much like Roth fair play to Charlie Cox: he nails the lighter take on the character and is frankly one of the stand-out parts of it.

As I said I felt it all came apart with the final episode (check the spoiler section if you want!) but overall I enjoyed it as a quick half-an-hour every week. I don’t know if the show has enough legs for a second season, mind you…

Overall Thoughts:

Abomination certainly took his sweet time returning to the MCU. I wonder if he got blipped or not?

She-Hulk never blew me away but it was mostly a fun half hour every week, apart from a finale I truly didn’t get on with. Can’t say I’ll ever feel like watching it again but it was harmless while it was on and I’m looking forward to seeing the titular character in the future, possibly with less fourth wall breaking antics and having a bit more of an impact on the greater MCU. This is why we need an MCU version of the Fantastic 4 already!

The final episode sets up a rather standard but perfectly fine fight scene between She-Hulk and a young billionaire named Todd Phelps (Jon Bass) who uses a vial of She-Hulk’s blood to undergo his own Hulk transformation, a plot thread that was weaved in the background of the show, while Hulk takes on Abomination not knowing he was now a “good guy”. Sadly they pushed the fourth wall thing too far and had She-Hulk say how uninspiring of a finale it was, jump out of the Disney + menu screen and into the “real world” to complain to the writers. She then met an A.I. named K.E.V.I.N. who was writing the MCU and gave him suggestions on how to do a better ending, which then happens. I really, really hate this much fourth wall breaking because now I can’t help but think “why doesn’t she just do that again?” and “does that mean every MCU film is actually just people acting out the will of a Kevin Feige-named gag robot?” I get the idea but it’s the kind of OTT fourth wall break that just annoys me. Plus it meant we didn’t get any actual resolution to the plot of the season because She-Hulk just scrubbed it.

There was even a remix of the Netflix intro during some of the Daredevil’s scenes… God that was a great show, the MCU version has a lot to live up to!

Oh well… The final scene sees She-Hulk and Matt Murdock dating and Bruce Banner revealing that his trip to space in the middle of the series was because he has a son called Skaar from his time on Sakaar, a plot straight from more recent comics. That’s a pretty significant plot point to pull out at the end of a comedy series, really. It’ll be interesting if that actually has any effect on the wider MCU going forward…