She-Hulk: Attorney at Law – A Normal Amount of Rage Review

She-Hulk has officially arrived in the MCU in the form of a half-hour comedy – another first for the MCU – with the always great Tatiana Maslany taking on the dual role of Jennifer Walters, human attorney at law, and She-Hulk, the green alter-ego who Jen maintains remarkable control over despite her cousin Bruce’s (yes, that Bruce) insistence that this whole transformation should be much harder for Jen to maintain. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. In the first installment of the nine-episode series, we met Jen, get her superhero origin story, and get to see her first public Hulking out. Not that most inspired of half hours, but it was funny – which is quite the change for an MCU superhero property.

The episode was at its strongest when it was letting Maslany and special guest star Mark Ruffalo riff with each other. The pair, playing cousins Jen and Bruce – who naturally share a key genetic component that allows them to utilize the gamma radiation that has seeped into their blood to become mean green fighting machines and not, you know, die – had plenty of chemistry and were clearly having a ball playing off one another. Jen’s attempt to figure out if Captain America died a virgin was particularly hilarious – and the mid-credit scene reveal that Bruce knew just when Cap lost his v-card was priceless. But as fun as their interactions were, I’m not sure we needed to spend the bulk of the episode in an extended training montage. Sure, I understand the value of an origin story for a character who fans might not be particularly familiar with, but with the show opting to break the fourth wall with regularity, why not just have Jen give us a quick run down of what went down in the accident, and move forward with the story? Instead, we get a too-long sequence that continues to tell us the same thing: Jen has managed to adapt to her new abilities with far more ease than Bruce did.

The most interesting part of the episode comes right at its end, with Jameela Jamil’s Titania literally bursting through a courtroom wall and getting into a minor skirmish that requires Jen to Hulk-out in public for the first time, letting the world know her secret. The show seems to be setting up a conflict in Jen’s lack of desire to be a public superhero – something Bruce warns her she will have to become once everyone is aware of her abilities – and the world’s need for another super human to save the world from the various everyday villains that lurk in the shadows (or crash through public courtroom walls in the middle of closing arguments). For a half hour comedy, that’s a pretty interesting pressure point to explore – usually when we have a superhero who doesn’t want to be one, we also get a ton of moping and complaining about the stress and pressure that comes from being a hero. Here, I suspect we’ll be getting plenty of quips and much less of the complaints – a welcome change in my book.

As for the quality of the series thus far, it’s hard to make any grandiose comments with only a single episode to judge, but I will say Maslany is great. Fans of Orphan Black, the BBC America series where Maslany played multiple clones and won an Emmy, likely expected she would do great, but for those who didn’t watch her previous compelling work – know that Maslany is a real pro and will be stellar in this role. It was also fun to get to see Ruffalo flex his comedy muscles a bit, something he doesn’t get the chance to do a lot in his big screen appearances as Hulk. But we also have to talk about the green elephant in the room: The series’ CGI. With acknowledgement toward the recent reports of how Marvel treats the studios that handle their VFX work (insane deadlines, last minute changes, low pay, etc.), boy was I hoping for something a bit better for a series like this one that relies so much on showing us a Hulked Jennifer. There are also reports, via interviews with showrunner Jessica Gao that the studio gave them carte blanche for adding as much Hulked Jen as possible – only to change their tune once the scripts came in with Jen as She-Hulk in multiple sequences. So, yet another issue that likely should have been handled earlier in the writing process. All of this is to say it’s clear there were issues on all sides with the CGI requirements for a series starring a character that spends a good chunk of time as a CGI created character.

But the CGI was not great. It didn’t pass the mouth test (watching to see if the character’s mouth matches the dialogue that is being spoken). The performances are great, the script was funny, and I found Jen to be quite charming and fun as a character. But Marvel needs to do something about their CGI issues – and that’s not something they can simply blame on their partner studios anymore, now that we are aware of their insane requirements for the VFX artists to make their goals. That being said, I enjoyed this first episode a lot more than I expected – and I even found myself laughing out loud in multiple points. Sure, at some point we’re probably going to see Jen get sucked into the larger MCU machine (and the story will start trending in such a way to set up another series or film), but I’m going to enjoy this Jen-focused story while I can. Before she becomes yet another cog in the MCU content machine.