Hellboy Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)April 6th, 2004
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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