I have a problem with this upcoming The Incredible Hulk film. Mine is a serious beef to grind, assuming a man is allowed the freedom to mix his metaphors; a burning festering irrational hatred that is probably unfounded in its audacity, but one that nevertheless files my throat with thick, viscous bile.

To summarize, I already saw a Hulk movie a few years ago. It was directed by Ang Lee, and it was awesome.

Okay, yes: people were extremely divided on this particular film, with most people wanting to divide it with an axe. It was an unusual film to say the least; a mature, adult-themed adaptation of a big green comic book hero, with heavy play given to pathos, cathartic demons of the soul, to Hemmingway-esque struggles between father and son, to repressed childhood trauma—not exactly the stuff of cross-promotion marketing and children’s toys.

Fans expecting to see a smash-em-up action adventure were mollified by the film’s somber, introspective take on the superhero genre, its long running time, and its total absence of anything that resembled large-scale Hulk Smashing. The film plummeted in the box office due to bad word-of-mouth, and Targets everywhere started sticking tiny red tags on all its Hulk-related merchandise, of which it had devoted two-thirds of its total retail floor space to. Ouch.

Valid beefs, all. I admit, the nay-sayers have a point. And that whole sequence with the dogs totally sucked. A lot of people felt let down by Hulk, and I respect that. But I cannot help but feel this new film, simply in existing, insults my intelligence in a dire and alarming fashion, one far more damaging than any nitpicking problems with the previous film.

Tossing out another Hulk film a scant five years later—not a sequel, mind you, but a “franchise reboot”—trying to erase it from the face of the earth radiates pure greed. For all its flaws, the most egregious failure of Hulk was its failure to make buttloads of money and sell lunch boxes, Burger King cups and plastic toys, and as a cinema fan, I could care less about this. I am more interested in a film that engages my attention, one that makes me want to discuss and debate its merits and flaws endlessly with anyone in earshot, and Hulk did that for me in spades. For once, a superhero movie actually refused to dumb down its subject and content to appease the endless parade of marketing opportunities. To me, The Incredible Hulk represents the unpleasant side of Hollywood, the kind that wants to take away all my money and give me nothing back in return.

Perhaps some executive in Hollywood actually feels passionate about the Hulk franchise, and really lobbied hard to tell the story “right”. Who knows? Perhaps in a warehouse in New Jersey somewhere, they have thousands and thousands of crappy Hulk toys that didn’t get sold. For whatever reason, now we have Hulk Take Two; a film that hopes with all its might to erase the terrible taste in your mouth left from the last Hulk film by pretending that it never even existed in the first place, like some bizarre Orwellian head trick. And by the look of the trailer, they are very keen to show you all kinds of Hulk Smashing, as if to reassure the masses that things will somehow be better this time. Honest.

You guys can have your new crappy superhero movie with no brain cells and Burger King action figures. Me, I’m happy with Hulk. It was, for all its pitfalls, an attempt to make a sophisticated superhero film (a contradiction if there ever was one), and for a director as acclaimed and world-renowned as Ang Lee to even dabble in the genre of comic book adaptations at all, well; ‘tis is a fortuitous thing indeed. Flawed, sure; but I’ll take a flawed film any day over yet another mindless popcorn superhero film that kills my brain cells.