Hellboy (2004): **** out of ****
Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Screenplay by del Toro and Peter Briggs,
based
on the comic books by Mike Mignola. Starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair,
Rupert
Evans, Doug Jones, Karel Roden, Jeffrey Tambor and John Hurt.
by Andy Keast
This film is a burst of fire. It's full of beautiful, operatic action and
wicked humor. Guillermo del Toro's film adaptation of Mike Mignola's
"Hellboy"
is more than just a comic book come to life, but living, breathing and
fighting
machine. It's story arc is perfect for a comic book universe, and
ridiculous
for this one. Del Toro said many times that "Hellboy" was a dream
project,
and
it shows.
The mythology of "Hellboy" plays like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in that
both
are based upon Hitler's obsession with the occult. A final effort by the
Nazis
to defeat the Allies involves harnessing hell's wrath through some kind of
temporal-spacial portal. On a remote British island, Nazi's have
commissioned
the resurrected Grigori Rasputin (the Rasputin, played by Karel Roden) to
open
a rift into hell, with a combination of technology and black magic. If
you're
not on board by this point, you're probably better off watching something
else.
Rasputin is assisted by the Nazi officer Kroenen, who went through a
masochistic surgical addiction and now lives as an undead (or something).
His
weapon of choice is a device that seems to be a hybrid of a police baton
and a
spearhead. Anyway, a British scientist named Trevor Bruttenholm (John
Hurt)
and a platoon of Allies stop their plan, but not quickly enough to keep a
demon
from entering our dimension. Bruttenholm rescues the demon from the
Nazis,
adopts him and gives him a name.
Flash forward sixty years. Ron Perlman plays Hellboy not as an
unstoppable
superman, but as an ordinary joe who just happens to be capable of the
extraordinary (a reoccurrence in all of del Toro's films). He smokes
cigars,
lifts weights, cracks wise and eats a lot. And he likes cats, which makes
sense given his origins in the underworld. He's also immortal and
fireproof,
and keeps his horns in check by filing them with a belt sander. He still
has
a
thing for Liz (Selma Blair), a pyrokinetic who is quiet and reserved, a
self-committed patient at a local mental hospital (I'll spare you of any
puns
about Blair being on fire in the movie). There is also Abe Sapien (Doug
Jones,
voiced by David Hyde Pierce), a fishman with a power of touch-activated
ESP.
I haven't even gotten to Hellboy's battles with the film's giant monsters
-grotesque, Cthulhu-like creatures that stomp and trample like rhinos,
have
elongating tongues and can lay eggs inside your wounds. There's a
breathtaking
fight between two hellbeasts that takes place through a number of subway
corridors. Del Toro films the action precisely the way a comic artist
would
draw it. They have a fiery kinetic energy. He and his cinematographer,
the
great Guillermo Navarro, color the environs and people as vivid and
animated
as
can be, the way Warren Beatty did in "Dick Tracy." The score by Italian
composer Marco Beltrami is at times powerful, particularly in the movie's
final
scenes, which are underscored by an apocalyptic chorus.
Hellboy's only shortcoming -in my mind- is that it's rated PG-13. There
were
some moments where I wanted del Toro to cross the line a few more feet
into
Cronenberg country, and become more graphic in the movie's killings as
he's
done previously. While watching Kroenen disembowel half a dozen cops
early in
the film (a well done sequence, mind you), not a single one of them spills
any
blood. They simply drop like dominos. There are maybe two or three
scenes in
the film where one can tell del Toro was holding back. No matter, it's
not my
movie. Perhaps an unrated DVD will quench my action movie id with a
little
more of the proverbial "juice."
My comparison to Cronenberg is valid, I think. Though he's been making
films
for over a decade, Guillermo del Toro has been grouped into what Fox 2000
has
been referring to as the "Mexican New Wave (Cuarón, Iñarritù, Serrano and
others)." His films seem to exist in a modern-day Dark Age, where relics,
alchemy and symbolism are taken seriously. All of his films retain a
Catholic
sensibility, using stark, bloody imagery of the netherworld and of
supernatural
objects (the scarab devices of "Cronos," the weapons of "Blade II," and
the
war
spoils of "El espinazo del Diablo"). Here again is a story steeped in the
supernatural and where characters are defined by their relics and magic.
Nicolas Cage, a comic enthusiast, once mentioned that comic books are
today's
version of mythology. "Hellboy" is a testament to that.
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X-RAMR-ID: 37502
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1269459
X-RT-TitleID: 1131153
X-RT-AuthorID: 9883
X-RT-RatingText: 4/4
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