Originally posted 4/7/04
Hellboy
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Writers: Screen story by Guillermo del Toro and Peter Briggs, Screenplay by Guillermo Del Toro, based on the Dark Horse comic book by Mike Mignola
Producers: Lawrence Gordon, Mike Richardson, Lloyd Levin
Stars: Ron Perelman, Rupert Evans, Selma Blair, John Hurt
Guillermo del Toro is a pulp filmmaker. He enjoys blood, fighting, exciting chunky-looking machinery, loud weird sounds, and all manner of imaginative grotesquerie. In a pulp filmmaker’s movie, no subterranean lair is complete without spiky walls, and when someone gets sucked into a small inter-dimensional portal, his body will be crunched and folded in half in order to fit. That is how inter-dimensional portals behave in such movies.
This makes him the ideal director for Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s much-adored comic book. Its take on the superhero myth is both droll and macabre; it requires a filmmaker who can revel in the pulp, ever-so-slightly wink at it, yet keep his eye fixed on a few genuine emotional issues under the surface. It’s a balancing trick not unlike those street performers who can juggle a bowling ball, a chainsaw, and a lit cigarette all at once. Rare is the artist of perverse enough mind to even attempt it.
We open in 1944. Nazis, in collaboration with Rasputin – just go with me, folks – are trying to open a portal to Hell which looks suspiciously like the logo of producer/financier Revolution Studios. I take this as either a coincidence or an acknowledgement of what led to the making of The Animal, Daddy Day Care, and The Master of Disguise. Our villains want to break the crystal prison which contains the seven Chaos Gods, who will then bring the Apocalypse to Earth.
One might point out that this would appear to work contrary to the Nazis’ ultimate goals, since they’d be wiped out as well, but since among the ne’er-do-wells on the island is an assassin who has surgically removed his eyelids and lips, has dust for blood, and whose body works on Swiss watch-winding technology, our brains sensibly move away from such troubling questions.
In any case, the ceremony is broken up by a platoon of American soldiers, and all that comes through the portal is a growling red baby with an enormous stone right hand and a taste for Baby Ruth bars. Professor Broom, a young agent of the secret Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, adopts him as his son. The soldiers dub the creature Hellboy.
Cut to the present, where a grown-up Hellboy (Ron Perlman under makeup that makes him look like a bulky red version of, well, Ron Perlman) is in charge of eliminating supernatural beasties for the Bureau. He likes to act as if he’s come to grips with being a demon raised as a regular guy. The way he files down his horns to stumps in an attempt to look more “normal” says otherwise, though.
The Professor (played in old age by the indispensable John Hurt) knows that a) his end is near, and b) a crisis is approaching which will force his “son” to face the true purpose he was sent to Earth for, and whether or not that counts for more than the life he’s led up until now.
We experience all of this through the eyes of the young Agent Meyers (Rupert Evans). He’s been recruited to be the new “liaison” – among his duties are trying to creatively explain the supposedly non-existent Hellboy to frightened civilians, and bringing him pancakes. Meyers spends most of the movie gamely playing catch-up in situations that would send most people into a permanent state of the screaming heebie-jeebies.
Hellboy’s backup includes a fish-man with an array of psychic powers named Abe Sapien. His body is performed by Doug Jones, but his distinctive voice comes courtesy of Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce. Pierce is not credited, but when he dryly observes to Hellboy “you live a charmed life”, you realize that’s exactly how Niles Crane might say it; that is if Frasier were to ever lift a large manhole cover and suddenly find over-sized cockroaches crawling all over him.
There’s a third member of the troika, Liz (Selma Blair). She’s pyrokinetic, and wonders whether living in a calming haze of Thorazine might just be better for everyone, since when she gets worked up, pretty much everything within a block’s radius gets incinerated, except (to the consternation of young male Selma Blair fans) her clothing. But if this is the trade-off we make to keep The Hulk’s pants intact, I’ll live with it.
Meanwhile, a remarkably resilient Rasputin and his minions haven’t given up on the whole Chaos Gods idea, and need Hellboy for their plans. Rasputin has such a convoluted array of supernatural powers that I can only sum them up by saying he has the power to Advance The Plot. For most of the middle of the movie, this involves repeatedly pitting Hellboy against a demon named Sammael.
Sammael suffers from the problem of many digital movie monsters – by constantly having him in high speed motion in dark environments, we lose all sense of clarity and resign ourselves to wait for the digitally-created blobs to stop pummeling each other and bouncing around for a few seconds so we can take score. The fight with the giant spider Shelob in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King has, for better or worse, raised the bar for such clashes by showing us how well it can be done if you care to put in the time.
On the whole the effects are serviceable without being particularly impressive. Still, Del Toro brings a manic glee to the action set-pieces, and it’s in them that we find the tone which is key to much of the movie’s success. As Hellboy is essentially invulnerable, we cruise along not on suspense about whether or not he’ll win the fight, but on enjoying his attitude as a blue-collar Joe with a very weird job.
When he sees a train bearing down on his head, he grumbles “Oh, hell” like a construction jobber who’s just been given one more load of bricks to move. Just because it won’t kill him doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. And when a battle with Sammael places a box of kittens in harms’ way, it’s just one more damn thing for the feline-loving Hellboy to have to worry about.
I wish that the climax involving those Chaos Gods made a little more sense. And I wish Karel Roden was able to bring a little more otherworldly megalomania to the role of Rasputin. I wish that Marco Beltrami’s music found a little more cohesiveness. So winning is Perlman’s embodiment of the role, and Del Toro’s affectionate translation of the character’s world, that instead of disliking the movie for these flaws, I was simply disappointed momentarily. But the feeling never lasted too long; as within minutes, Hellboy was again being flung through the air by some Lovecraftian beast, grimacing, and dreading how that one was going to feel in the morning.