Hellboy Review
by Andy Keast (arthistoryguy AT aol DOT com)April 5th, 2004
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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