Since we have comments about the '03 film...
I'll admit, when Hulk first came out, I thought it was great. It looked like someone had given effort to elevate the material. I even brought others with me to watch it a second time. What confused me at the time was all of the negative word-of-mouth.
Then, the DVD came out. It's about then I realized how flawed a film Hulk was. For one, the origin story was massive. Alot of people talk about how much time Spider-Man spent on it, but when you think about it half of it was origin and the other half was Silver Age comic extravaganza. Hulk, on the other hand, spent the first act of the film just discussing Banner's origin. We don't get a closed door to that until the movie ends. Then, sporadically, the dialogue drops lines about Hulk's origin that are so confusing that it took a few freeze-frames in the montage and some repeat viewings just to understand what was being said.
I'm reading comments, mostly from Godman, claiming that Hulk was just too intelligent for most viewers. Here's a definition of that word in the Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary:
Ask yourself: Was it in good judgment or sound thought to make a film about the Hulk (the angriest man in the world) predominantly into a drama? How, then, was it an "intelligent" film? The answer is that it wasn't. What it was, however, was muddled and tedious. That's not the same as being an intelligent film.