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Movies based on comic books are a genre all their own, and they are
becoming more alike these days, as it gets increasingly more difficult
to squeeze through the ever-narrowing channel of creative diversity
necessary to get the green light from movie studios. Guillermo del Toro's
"Hellboy" is no exception. While it's not a bad movie, it does seem to
have lost the more interesting (that is, "darker") aspects of original
themes that typically engender this genre. The net result is a cornucopia
of wow-inspiring special effects that do more to serve the masses than to
tell the more dramatic story that the creator likely intended.
The hero here is played by Ron Perlman, a buff evil-spirit crime
fighter who's midway between adolescence and adulthood, the theme that's
characteristic of the genre as a whole. The best part of the film is
the beginning, where we learn how Hellboy came into being and what his
mission on Earth turns out to be. Back in World War II, the evil madman
Grigori Rasputin devises a machine with the help of the Nazis to reach
into the paranormal and awaken the devil in order to perpetrate evil on
Earth. Allied forces, led by the paranormal scientist, Professor Broom,
played by John Hurt, who's been following Rasputin's work, disrupt the
experiment in process, but too late to prevent "something" from coming
through: a little tiny baby devil, and a few other bad things yet to
be discovered. The Nazis are defeated, leaving the young devil child
to Broom, who goes on to found the Bureau for Paranormal Research and
Defense. Their mission: to fight evil with the help of Hellboy and
other super-human freaks of nature.
The beginning is the most engaging part of the movie, and is a solid
foundation for a great story to boot. Yet, the standard movie "formula"
kicks in, diluting it down to a fusion of other films ranging from
Ghostbusters to X-Men, with a little humor sprinkled in. A young FBI agent
is hand-picked, for no real reason we're told, to be the heir apparent
to the now-aging Professor Broom. He acts as the personal assistant to
Hellboy, but the relationship takes a distant back seat to the growing
attention to the evil special effects that dominate the screen at almost
every turn.
As is always the case with freakish superheroes who mirror their comic
book creators, they are the loner, rebellious teenagers, emotionally
and physically coming of age, all while trying to focus on their
responsibilities in life. For a superhero fighting evil and saving the
world, that's a big job. That underlying tone is what gives us empathy
for the hero and engages us in the subplots of the film. Yes, Hellboy
does have these qualities too, but this aspect isn't drawn out much,
and there are no subplots to speak of, leaving the entire story more
about killing the Helldogs. (Oh yeah, that's what his mission is.)
To be thorough, the movie still has its enjoyable qualities, the personas
are true to character, the plot holds your interest and the special
effects are certainly noteworthy. Still, the parts add up to so much more
than the whole that this imbalance makes you stop caring. For those who
aren't concerned about such things, this is the movie for you. And if
the teenagers in the theater were a sampling of that, I would say the
movie accomplished exactly what it intended.
You can listen to an audio review of this film
here.
You can find this movie on the internet database here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167190/
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