IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
HELLBOY
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Rated PG-13. 132 minutes
Hellboy is the kind of movie that defies criticism. A review of it
is
about as relevant as a restaurant review of Burger King. If you're even
thinking about going to see Hellboy, you're already primed. You probably
know
something about the characters, who spring from the pages of the Dark
Horse
comic book series by Mike Mignola. As far as plot is concerned, the
particulars are incomprehensible, but in general terms it has to do with
saving
the world from the forces of evil, which I think we can all agree is a
good
thing.
The prologue to Hellboy unfolds in the closing months of World War
II.
Things are apparently not going well for Hitler, and he has sent some of
his
weirder minions (including Rasputin - yes, that Rasputin) to the wilds of
Scotland (why Scotland? Search me - maybe for the rain) to open the
mystic
portal to "a dark place where ancient evil slumbers" and summon the Seven
Gods
of Chaos. Fortunately, the Allies are onto this scheme, and a small squad
of
American soldiers is on hand. Accompanying them is FDR's personal
paranormal
consultant, Professor Bruttenholm (John Hurt), who recalls in voice over
that
what happened that day would "not only alter the course of history, but
change
my life forever," a rhetorical sequence that feels backwards in terms of
importance. The good guys break up the party, but not before the portal
has
remained open long enough to allow a little creature to pop through from
the
underworld. He's a bright red tyke with a monkey face, a barbed tail,
horns,
and a right forearm the size of a jackhammer. Happily for the fate of the
world, he falls into the hands of the Americans. Prof. Bruttenholm wins
his
trust with a Baby Ruth candy bar, and names him (unfortunately, he later
concedes) Hellboy.
Fast-forward sixty years to the present. Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is
now
grown to hell-manhood. He's a big drink of latex, with all of his
original
primary physical characteristics now writ large. His friends call him
Red. To
try to fit in, he has snapped off his horns and filed down the stumps, but
he's
still the kind of guy who stands out in a crowd. It helps that the crowd
he
hangs around with is the gang down at the Bureau for Paranormal Research
and
Defense, which includes oddballs like Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, with the
voice of
David Hyde Pierce), an amphibious type who lives mostly in a big fish
tank.
And there's Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a poster girl for spontaneous human
combustion, who has voluntarily committed herself to an institution to try
to
deal with her propensity for bursting into flames when she's riled up.
Hellboy
has the hots for her.
And then there are the bad guys, led by the mad monk Rasputin (Karel
Roden) and his blonde Aryan girlfriend Ilsa the Nazi she-wolf (Bridget
Hodson),
assisted by their hitman Kroenen (Ladislav Beran) rampaging like a nuclear
Edward Scissorhands, and the slithery Sammael (Brian Steele). When you
look at
the characters he hangs around with, you have to wonder why Hellboy feels
he
has to file down those horns to look normal.
Filling out the picture are the Paranormal R&D agency administrator
Tom
Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), an unpleasant bureaucratic sort; and
smooth-cheeked
young agent John Myers (Rupert Evans), who is brought in to the agency as
the
aging and ailing Prof. Bruttenholm's heir apparent, and never seems to
figure
out what he's doing in the movie.
The ringmaster for this circus is writer/director Guillermo del Toro,
the
Mexican filmmaker with such sci-fi and horror credits as Cronos (1993),
Mimic
(1997), and The Devil's Backbone (2001). Del Toro has a deft touch with
character, which helps a lot in a movie which might otherwise be
asphyxiated
beneath the slime and blubber of horrible and fantastically
self-regenerating
alien life forms. The computer-generated monster here is of the familiar
toothy mutant octopus family, enormous and ubiquitous and virtually
indestructible. An interesting bit of trivia: del Toro spent four years
as a
vegetarian when he was a kid in the '70s as a result of seeing Texas Chain
Saw
Massacre. One has to wonder if he's now thinking about giving up
calamari.
He has a good cornerstone for this movie in Perlman, with whom he's
worked
several times before. Perlman gives his character a wry human quality,
physically durable but emotionally vulnerable. In one nice scene the
jealous
Hellboy, spying on Agent Myers out walking with Liz, leaps from building
to
building and finally ends up sharing a snack and getting some love advice
from
a nine-year-old who is out on a rooftop tending his pigeons. Perlman is
good
with a quip, and manages to convey an impressive sense of character from
beneath the pounds of makeup he wears.
Del Toro marshals a lot of atmosphere into this tall tale, using
plenty of
religious imagery and mythological reference, and symbolism that focuses
heavily on the underground, with caves and subways and the like. But
ultimately the movie falls captive to the suffocating, tentacly embrace of
the
monster and the endless repetitions of the struggle to destroy it. It
could
have stood to lose about twenty minutes of ugly fat.
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X-Language: en
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X-RT-TitleID: 1131153
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