This weekend, instead of raiding the comic-book menagerie for a new franchise or spin-off, Marvel Comics and Universal Studios are marching out a big, green do-over. “The Incredible Hulk” pumps up the muscle and loses the brains and heart of Ang Lee’s 2003 take on the mercurial hero, which proved all too radioactive at the box office. The lazy, brutish new rampage retains fashionably off-center non-stars (Edward Norton, Tim Roth) but reverts character, plot, and logic to their summer standard as filler that you tolerate until the smashing returns.

It turns out that the patient genre rejiggering in comic-book adaptations such as “Iron Man” and “Batman Begins” really does make a difference. But then, the director of “The Incredible Hulk,” Louis Leterrier, cut his teeth on films such as “Transporter 2” and “Unleashed,” so there was reason to worry from the outset. The makers of “The Incredible Hulk” throw all their energies into a few bowel-vibrating set pieces of varying impact, but they seem unable to sustain much else in this largely spiritless and often shabby effort. Hulk more angry, yes, but not so interesting.

We rejoin Bruce Banner (Mr. Norton) as he hides out in Rio de Janeiro, a setting that nominally picks up on the ending of “Hulk” but is the starting point for a separate adventure. As an almost comically prolonged credit montage shows, Banner more closely resembles his incarnation from the old 1970s television show: He’s a victim of a gamma-ray experiment, doomed to an endless pursuit of a cure rather than a reconciling of genetic demons. American General Ross (an inert William Hurt) hunts after and musters firepower against Banner; Ross’s distressed daughter, Betty (Liv Tyler), devotes herself to her not-very-ex-boyfriend’s escape and efforts at self-cooling (he wears a pulse-rate monitor).

Incubating throughout the movie is villain Emil Blonsky (Mr. Roth), a mercenary hired by Ross. He’ll eventually, and eagerly, turn monster through the wonders of super-duper military spinal injections. Until then, he’s Ross’s shifty proxy in the field for several mobilizations, including a foot chase through favelas that imperfectly imitates the Jason Bourne actioners, and a particularly ludicrous and ill-shot military fracas at the granite-and-grass college where Betty teaches.

This Hulk, introduced with peekaboo glances rather than a flourish, takes a swampy shade of green. He’s more prone to tossing vehicles and other playthings, and favors climactic, Wrestlemania-style bellows. In the film’s drab computer-generated renderings, he and the unleashed Blonsky, in fact, appear to be steroidal man-o-saurs. They’re intimidating enough, but they don’t pack the flesh-and-blood, slightly feral menace of bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno from the ’70s TV show.

Their pummeling showdown takes place, somewhat arbitrarily, in Harlem, near the anonymous university where Banner and Betty consult an excitable neurobiologist (Tim Blake Nelson, maybe the only actor here who actually has fun with his role). In Mr. Leterrier’s perfunctory New York, by the way, the two hail a “crazy cabbie” who’s beyond cliché.

Along the way to this finale, Banner and Betty share soapdish interludes and, whenever he transforms, moments spotlighting her feminine ability to mollify her freakish but kindhearted man. Mr. Norton is at times almost apologetically earnest (“That’d be so great,” he thanks one potential Samaritan) and has little rapport with the heartbreakingly gentle Ms. Tyler. Mr. Norton was rumored to have pressed for more scenes of character development, but it’s unclear if Mr. Leterrier’s shaky film would even have benefited.

Mr. Roth, who becomes an increasingly gristly presence, is repeatedly set up for action-movie zingers that fall flat, though the screenplay (credited to perennial adapter Zak Penn and Mr. Norton) surprises with the occasional one-liner. A welcome presence, however, is Mr. Ferrigno, who belts out the Hulk’s signature roars and also makes a cameo. Playing a corruptible campus guard, he provides the rare unguarded moment in a summer blockbuster when he beams naturally at the prospect of fresh pizza.

“The Incredible Hulk” fails on its own (de)merits, but it’s also been argued to me that the character’s template simply lacks the real arc or moral conflict that might vitalize the storytelling. (There is certainly something pitiful about the recurring device of flashing Banner’s number of “Days Without Incident,” a phrase evoking the safety record of a cannery.) Yet a hunted superhero without control over (or much desire for) his power remains compelling, and Mr. Lee, in his film, took a promising and more exciting tack in imagining the demonic persistence of trauma. But the bean counters and seat-fillers may well favor this latest assault instead.