Hulk: Reloaded has cast its net again and come up with yet another intriguing fish: none other than Tim Roth will play the villain of the piece, Emil Blonsky, a mad Russian who purposefully exposes himself to an even bigger dose of gamma radiation than Bruce Banner and turns into The Abomination. If that is a self-applied moniker, Blonsky needs some work on his self esteem.
Tim Roth is, of course, a goddamned great actor (and fantastic in a roundtable interview setting, where I saw him swat a particularly annoying reporter to my endless delight), and pitting him against Ed Norton is joyous. In the comics The Abomination cannot change back into a human being, but I have to imagine that either won’t be the case in the film or The Abomination won’t show up in full Abominable form until the end of the picture, unless Louis Letterier has just hired Tim Roth to do voicework for a CGI monster in little blue undies.
Roth, one of the few great British actors to not appear in a Harry Potter movie, seems to love jumping between low and highbrow films – his next two releases will be Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth and Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights. Sadly, many of his later lowbrow movies have been crap like the Planet of the Apes remake and Dark Water – let’s hope that The Incredible Hulk ain’t in league with those.