Idris Elba has only been a teensy tiny part of the superhero movie genre: He’s played Heimdall, the Asgardian bridge guard in the Thor wing of the MCU. But SNL can work miracles. In a short film sketch aired early into his episode, he got to become not the Hulk but a Hulk — to be exact, the “Impossible Hulk.”
Elba plays a seemingly mild-mannered man who knows what it’s like to encounter constant soft bigotry. It makes him angry, as it should. In fact, it makes him so angry that he can transform into his superheroic alter ego. Said alter ego just happens to be a white woman (Cecily Strong), whose anger doesn’t attract more hostility, or even the police. No, because she’s a white woman, she gets what she wants.
It’s pretty savage satire, so much so that one wishes the sketch was even more scathing. The inciting incident that awakens Elba’s inner-white lady tiptoes around the bigger social ailment, offering up a simple misunderstanding that only approaches ugliness because Elba starts raising his voice to another white women. He also gets angry at fellow black tenants in his building who won’t turn down the music. Still, this three-minute sketch is better than at least two-thirds of the MCU and at least half of the DCEU.
