Hellboy: "I hate those comic books. They never get the eyes right."
The original comic-book superheroes were mythic projectiles launched straight out of the id. Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man embodied such essential facts of adolescent life as the nerd's desire to be strong, and the hidden dark side of courage. The new comic-book crime fighters still give vent to those feelings, but as characters they often appear to be based less on human drives than on... previous comic-book superheroes. Their powers may differ, but their ''identities'' are a bit like Xerox copies; you could call just about any of them X-Men.
Take, for instance, the title character of Hellboy, a likably squirmy special-effects zapfest based on Mike Mignola's popular series of Dark Horse graphic novels. Hellboy, as played by Ron Perlman, is a tall, indestructible battler of evil, a thickly muscled humongo freak with skin as red as tandoori chicken. Born - literally - as a devil (he emerged, as a cute baby demon, through an underworld portal at the end of WWII), Hellboy has spent the years in virtual lockdown at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, where he's a prisoner of his mutant physique and - on those occasions when he's allowed out - his clandestine role as evil-basher. He still has his snapping tail, but he keeps his two thick horns shaved all the way down to his forehead; it's his way of trying to look ordinary - and, more tellingly, of suppressing his demonic nature in order to do good.
Perlman, who, coincidence or not, starred in the 1987 TV series ''Beauty and the Beast" as... the beast, has been given oversize teeth, muttonchop sideburns, and a samurai top-knot, and his jawline and brow have been built up to look even more thick-boned than they already are. Yet his performance is anything but heavy. Chomping on a stogie as he spits out epithets like ''Aw, crap,'' he plays Hellboy with the airy, cynical shrug of a guy who will take down any menace, trash any monster, because somebody's gotta do it. He battles leaping, snorting creatures that look like oversize digital warthogs with tentacles, but his charm is that he goes about it as casually as a repairman. Those shaved horns look like work goggles.
He has also been stitched together, like Frankenstein's monster, out of old familiar images and concepts. In essence, Hellboy is the Hulk with rosier skin tones and the ability to talk - at this point, a welcome quality in a magnum-lug superhero. Suited up for action in his leather trench coat, wielding a colossal, stone-like right hand that might have been transplanted from the Thing in Fantastic Four, Hellboy struts through danger zones like a Schwarzenegger commando. But he's a rippling demon Arnold with a tender soul. Staring at his fellow misfit Liz (Selma Blair), a lonely girl with pyrokinetic powers who is also enlisted by the BPRD, he says, ''I wish I could do something about this,'' waving a hand in front of his face. He's in the sensitive-brute tradition of outcasts like the Beast and the Hunchback of Notre Dame: a monster who's hurtin' inside because he's too ugly to be loved.
Hellboy is directed by Guillermo del Toro with a colourfully kinetic visual imagination that seldom lets up. Del Toro, the former art-house creep-meister turned megaplex fantasist, knows just how long to hold a shot of blood oozing through an ornate stone maze or ghouls flying through a ghostly museum so that we feel as if the sets and effects are serving the story rather than the other way around. He shows far more narrative finesse than was evident in such recent comic-book duds as Daredevil or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Perlman, acting under all that make-up, gives a performance of gruff sympathy that, at moments, comes close to wit. I've seen Hellboy three times so far and I enjoyed myself on every occasion, yet the film, a highly derivative compendium of geek dreams, is little more than a well-executed contraption. But you just can't help feeling all fuzzy and thrilled when you stumble across a flick this amusing and well-spirited.
The Hellboy mythology is sprinkled with references to the Nazis, Rasputin, and other sinister forces of old. The film's most colourful bad guy is a former occult leader of the Third Reich who wears a metal plate on top of his disfigured face and whirls twin blades around with a zesty slash of finesse. He's supposed to be a spirit of malevolence ricocheting through the ages, but I just looked at him and thought, It's Darth Vader meets Wolverine (with less personality than either). That basic contradiction aside (that our hero is fighting ''metaphysical'' evil with pure, meaty brawn), Hellboy remains both an engaging and extremely fun film, and one of the best comic-book films since the trend became popular.
Hellboy II (2008) **** / *****
Abe Sapien: "Remind me why I do this again.
Hellboy: Rotten eggs and the safety of mankind.Hellboy: [drunk] "Why is she mad at me? And it's not about the mess, either, it's about something else.
Abe Sapien: [also drunk] Well, ask her then!
Hellboy: No! Look, Abe, when a woman's mad at you, but she's really mad about something else, and you have to ask, she gets mad because you had to ask in the first place! You know?
Abe Sapien: Uh...
Hellboy: Never mind, don't answer that."
I stumbled out of Hellboy II: The Golden Army feeling as if my imagination had eaten too much. In terms of sheer spectacle and visual invention, Hellboy II is an absolute knock-out, frames stuffed with bizarre creatures and mystic runes and arcane weaponry and wondrous design. And yet, Hellboy II has more than a little heart to it; it's scrappy and self-aware, and never out of touch with what it is.
Adapting Mike Mignola's post-superhero retro-styled comic series for the second time, Guillermo del Toro corrects some of the mistakes of the first Hellboy, makes a few mistakes of its own, picks itself up, keeps going. And, on the way, knocks the back of your eyeballs for a loop. Hellboy II: The Golden Army does what it says on the tin: It is a sequel about a character named Hellboy, and yes, an army of golden warrior-robots is involved, the mystical weapon of mass destruction that the elf-prince Nuada (Luke Goss) hopes to seize control of so as to wage war against humanity ... I know I'm getting ahead of myself. Then again, so does Hellboy II, right from the jump, and it doesn't slow down.
And it's exactly that giddy, goofy momentum that keeps the film moving. You get the epic war at the dawn of time between man and the mystic world shown with stop-motion as your prologue; later, you get a drunken sing-a-long to the strains of Barry Manilow. You get a big-finish fight scene that feels like a big-finish fight scene, but you also get a Three Stooges sequence played out with paranormal powers. Did you see the first film? Yeah, well, this is like that one, but slightly better.
If you want to see Hellboy II - and again, I'd wager that if you haven't seen Hellboy, you're not reading this - you'll enjoy it, and you should see it on the big screen. There are moments here that stun and amaze, like when Hellboy (played with the right combination of manly presence, tough-guy machismo and self-deprecating humour by Ron Perlman) leads his team of paranormal trouble-shooters to a secret under-place called the troll market, hidden beneath the shadows of many worlds and located under the Brooklyn Bridge. The troll market may be the most dizzying overdose of fantastic place-setting since Luke and Obi-Wan cruised into Mos Eisley and walked into the cantina.
But, to Del Toro's credit, you also get a sense of the people in that place, too. The tour of the troll market sequence not only follows evil Prince Nuada's trail as he seeks the crown that will control the golden army, but also as Hellboy and Liz (Selma Blair) talk about how they have to talk. At the same time, fish-man-walking Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) is tailing a mysterious blonde - who happens to be the sister of Prince Nuada, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton, who looks just like a younger Emily Watson), who's fleeing with the final part of the shattered crown her brother will need to make whole before he can raise the golden army against man's plague.
Nonsense? Yes, and well-played. Hellboy II's got flesh-eating fairies, gods and monsters, crypto-fascist kung-fu elves and clockwork killing machines lit with eldritch fire; it knocks off cop shows and Victorian adventure tales and John Woo's Hard Boiled and gets in jokes like the news anchor who asks, inspired by Liz and Hellboy's relationship, "Inter-species marriage - is it a threat to traditional marriage?" It has a cool new supporting character, the disembodied busy-body bureaucrat Johann Kraus (voiced by Seth McFarlane in mock-Teutonic tones out of Danny Kaye or Mel Brooks), who is as much a supporting character as he is cool and new.
The plotline and transitions are still a little lumpy, but less so than last time; the bad guys and their plan are far better defined, and drive the film far more firmly than Hellboy's faceless bland baddies. And Del Toro and his effects team bring the freaky in every possible way; it has demon-on-robot fist-fight action and ravenous little scurrying terrors that go for your bones, first; it's got winged messengers of death and a verdant, violent earth elemental rising above the streets of Brooklyn. But even with that sensory overload and tumbling avalanche of ideas, you can't say that Del Toro doesn't try, sincerely, to give you plot and character links to string into a lifeline to get through the storm, or provide a little blinking moment of bizarre fun or style to light the way.
Is Hellboy II all sound and fury, signifying nothing, or, worse, nerdiness? Quite possibly, but, 2008 blockbusters considered, it's got the heart and enthusiasm that the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull lacked, the brute you can root for that The Incredible Hulk didn't quite give us, more geeky slapdash fun than the shiny-fast Iron Man and a better mix of effective story and special effects than Speed Racer - and if Hellboy II signifies nothing, well, at least there's a hell of a lot of it.
Like all sequels, it's a bit overstuffed, but I can't also say what you would lose; the fat provides a lot of the flavour. And I never felt transported to another world or invested in the characters past their four-color surfaces, even as Del Toro's sights and wonders put me in a look@that! state of nerd-vana. And the finale sets up places to go for the series, even if it doesn't conclusively make us crave that; as much as Del Toro's the only man for that hypothetical job, I'd rather see him making his own films, which is part of why I'm so unenthused by the prospect of his version of The Hobbit. I don't know if I need a Hellboy III, but The Golden Army feels like a summertime comic-book flick that doesn't want, or need, to be a blockbuster and instead simply and sincerely succeeds as a great matinee.
Abe Sapien: "Now, see, I love this song. And I can't smile, or cry. I think I have no tear ducts."
Abe Sapien: Ah!"
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