Director and screenwriter Guillermo Del Toro's new film Hellboy is an adaptation of Mike Mignola's long-running comic book series of the same name. It follows the exploits of a big red demon, Hellboy (Ron Perlman), who, toward the end of World War II, was brought from hell to earth through an inter-dimensional portal by the Nazis, but was then intercepted by U.S. troops.
Having been raised by his adoptive father in the U.S., Hellboy is now a paranormal investigator for a secret branch of the U.S. government. He gets by with a little help from his friends, which include an aqua-man named Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and human FBI agent John Myers (Rupert Evans). Hellboy's love interest is a girl who can conjure up fire from her body, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair, who now looks eerily similar to actress Wendy Malick, from the old HBO show "Dream On"). With the help of these supporting characters, Hellboy pursues his essential mission to protect the world from all sorts of weird, paranormal evil.
From a visual standpoint, the film is nearly flawless. The cinematography, sets, costumes and special effects are all top-notch. Del Toro did an excellent job of bringing a comic book's visual style to the big screen, and it's obvious that he was very concerned with creating a strong, singular visual style for the film. The use of CGI (computer graphic imaging) was, thankfully, kept to a minimum, with elaborate costumes, matte paintings, and models used instead.
Perlman's acting is pitch-perfect, and his prior experience with bulky prosthetics (he played the Beast in the creepy live-action TV show "Beauty and the Beast") really shines through in the film, as his movement in the costume comes across as very natural and unaffected.
Blair's performance, however, was a bit of a disappointment, considering that much of the plot hinges on the idea that Hellboy is madly in love with her character, and will go to any lengths to be with her. It's hard to believe that anyone could find much to like in Blair's performance; it was a morose, flaccid characterization that most any living thing, demon or not, would have difficulty sitting next to on a bus for more than two minutes.
But this is the type of inconsistency that dampens the overall effect of the film. At times, it seems as though it wants to be taken as a Men in Black-type paranormal comedy (I found that I kept making a mental comparison while watching the film), with all sorts of "gee-whiz" gadgetry at the Center for Paranormal Research, along with situations of comic misunderstanding that seemed designed to create "insert witty/sarcastic remark here" situations.
The film is, however, refreshingly self-aware. Del Toro utilizes the rich history of the comic to create a constant sense of exploration, using sight gags and visual hints to give his audience a nudge and a wink. Unlike many films of this genre, information about the characters and the plot was nicely distributed throughout the plot. This prevented one of the main problems that many action films encounter, in which the entire plot conflict is laid out in the first 15 minutes, and the remaining majority of the movie consists solely in watching the characters move through pre-established plot checkpoints.
Breaking the fun-filled pace of the film, though, were numerous derailments into well-meaning but somewhat questionably executed moments of melodrama. While moments of explicit introspection are not something I would normally fault a film for containing, it proves to be a fairly jarring move in Hellboy, as the drama often comes across "dropped in," and not a real part of the diegetic framework of the film. Of course, Blair's inability to act also contributed to the dramatic moments being a bit uninvolved.
Despite my feelings about the ill-placed drama and Blair's underwhelming performance, Hellboy really is a fun movie. Del Toro spent over five years trying to get this film made, and only with the success of his last film, Blade II, was he finally able to secure the funding. His love for his characters and the source material are evident at every turn.
For the most part, he seems content to simply make a very good comic book movie, and when he stays within that mindset, the movie is a lot of fun. It does run into trouble occasionally, though, when the mood of the film begins to veer off in the direction of Ang Lee's The Hulk, in which dramatic introspection begins to overshadow the main point for such genre films: to smash stuff up real good. Nevertheless, Hellboy never lags for more than a minute or two, and its strengths definitely outweigh its weaknesses.
Hellboy doesn't elevate the comic book movie genre to a new level, but that probably wasn't Del Toro's mission. Hellboy provides you with an entertaining experience that, provided you like movies based on comic books, is worth two hours of your time and $9 from your wallet.
