Overall Rating
  Awesome: 22.56%
Worth A Look: 40%
Average: 16.92%
Pretty Bad: 11.28%
Total Crap: 9.23%
13 reviews, 117 user ratings
|
|
| Hellboy (2004) |
by Chris Parry
"One for the fanboys, and those with an ability to go with the pretend stuff"
|
Never read the comic book. Gave up the whole comic book thing when Hollywood destroyed the value of my Punisher, Judge Dredd and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles collections (that is, the cool original TMNT series, not the Archie kiddy version). So Hellboy rolls around and you could cut my anticipation with a chainsaw. But only a chainsaw. Red guy with sawed off horns and a stone hand - gotcha. Okay, let's get this thing over and done with... ooh, nice start. Hey, nice middle. Loving the characters. Digging the effects. WHAT? IT'S OVER ALREADY?! BUT I WANT MORE!Hellboy (Ron Perlman) comes from a world not dissimilar to ours, with one small twist - the Nazis opened a portal to hell and a small demon boy got through. The government caught him, housed him, educated him and turned him into a crime fighter of sorts, and a reluctant crime fighter at that. To the general public, Hellboy is more myth than reality, and the G-men like to keep it that way, so HB lives his life in a one-room cavern. He's let out under strict supervision to fight bad guys, but he'd much rather be eating chocolate bars, playing with his cats and bitching about his long lost love, a pyrokinetic 'normal' gal called Liz (Selma Blair).
This is the point where Hellboy had me - a superhero who doesn't particularly enjoy being super, a big red guy pining after a messed up mutant, and a world that isn't so obsessed with fantasy that I can't relate. Sure, this guy may start each day grinding back his horns with a Black and Decker angle grinder, and he may be able to punch his way out of the back of a train, but he's got everyday issues to deal with. He's bored. He's nasty. He's bitter. Why, if he didn't get to beat on aliens once in a while, he'd probably start knitting or obsessively watching porn or hitting on 52-year-old women in chatrooms.
Thankfully, his world is conjured by the directorial wizardry of Guillermo Del Toro, who managed to make the turgid Mimic script almost worth watching, and put a nice dark sheen on the Blade franchise with Blade II. With Hellboy, Del Toro made certain to keep the original creator of the character close in the loop, ensuring that even the drooling black death metal T-shirt crowd are whooping up a storm, rather than picking out petty differences between the comic and the flick.
For those who have never read the comics before, take it from a fellow Hellvirgin, this is worth going to see. Essentially a low budget superhero movie (change came back from $60m, reportedly), every cent is splayed across the screen, and every scene looks fantastic. Secondary characters, while given ample screen time, are shelved when the time is right to shelve them, and the star of the show is allowed to walk away with the film in scene after scene.
Ron Perlman was born to be Hellboy, and although the fight scenes are the stuff of Matrix legend, it's the quiet moments that the choice of Perlman really pays off. When Hellboy meets a teenage boy on a rooftop, the kid doesn't freak out and run, he instead counsels Hellboy on his love problems, and Hellboy duly sits down and opens up to the kid. You half expect the little guy to say, "Bitches, man." I really enjoyed the scene, and every other one like it, because the strength of a superhero is not when he's being awesome, it's when he's looking in the mirror and hating what he sees. It's what Joel Schumacher never understood about Batman, and it's why Spiderman and X-Men have worked so well, while Hulk failed miserably.
As a character, Hellboy is far more real than the last handful of Bruce Wayne's, and his side kick, Abe Sapien (voiced by David Hyde Pierce) has plenty of great moments of his own. One major black hole in the film is Hellboy's handler John Myers (Rupert Evans), who was no doubt picked for the role because he draws absolutely no attention away from the main character. The problem is, he's the antithesis of everything else on the screen. Everything you see in Hellboy is huge - the backdrops, the effects, the fight scenes, the lead, and then there's wimpy John trying to be Hellboy's friend. As he's continually spurned, you kind of understand Hellboy's motivation - I wouldn't want to hang out with this doofus either.
But while this film hits the high notes in many areas, it doesn't hit them uniformly. Some scenes tend to drag, and the involvement of a guy called Rasputin seems to do nothing to move the story along. Rasputin is far from the kind of eery bad guy you want in a flick like this, and he manages to bring the audience right out of the film whenever he's on screen. Ditto, Selma Blair seems a little at ends playing opposite CGI, turning in a performance that is far from her best work, though you'd be hard pressed to really give a damn.
This is a big, fun, silly comic book film that sets up this new world perfectly well, delivers plenty of punch along the way, and though the bad guys get repetitive (come on, how many of the same kind of aliens is this guy going to have to kill?), just go with it and have a blast.I've seen bad superhero movies before. This is not a bad superhero movie. Enjoy.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=9069&reviewer=1
originally posted: 04/02/04 17:21:34
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
USA
02-Apr-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 19-Oct-2004
UK
02-Sep-2004 (12A)
Australia
19-Aug-2004 (M)
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
