April 21, 2004
A Real Good-Looking Boy
At some point, I need to just go ahead and create some other site for my Pulse film reviews. But today I'm going to bombard you with three of them from this month's issues. In honor of Hellboy, a smash-em, bash-em, demon-fightin' film I enjoyed more than I thought I could, I also offer this violent bonus: A list of people Jack White should beat up next.
Big red hero has great fun battling gothic monsters
By Aaron Mesh
Published in the April 7 issue of the Pulse
Pity the mad monk Rasputin: poisoned, stabbed, shot, drowned and, in the ultimate insult, never adequately portrayed in the movies. The few photographs of the Russian occultist show a bearded figure with an eerie gaze that makes Steve Buscemi look like Bambi – a stare that suggests some unspeakable horror is crouched over the cameraman’s right shoulder. No movie has quite captured the blood-curdling look in Rasputin’s eyes, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy is, sadly, no exception. Grigori Rasputin is the chief villain of Del Toro’s movie, undead and bent on releasing some awful presence from another dimension, but as embodied by Karel Roden, he is merely bald and bulky, looking like what might happen if Joe Pantoliano had the bad fashion sense to become Amish.
Fortunately, Hellboy gets just about everything else in its exaggerated universe right, especially its title character, a hulking red demon released into the world by Rasputin but immediately enlisted into the apparently inexhaustible task of fighting evil. Hellboy, as effortlessly played by Ron Perlman, is a good-natured, horned oaf with equal predispositions toward cocksure toughness and boyish petulance. He spends his working hours wisecracking and battling the spawn of Satan, and his downtime eating pancakes. Lots of pancakes. (The movies best visual jokes involve weary FBI agents delivering heaping mounds of flapjacks to the hero’s lair.)
The movie follows its protagonist’s lead: it’s both intricately gruesome and innocently amusing, an instant schlock classic that knows how ridiculous it is. In cased you haven’t already guessed, Hellboy is based on a comic strip, and Del Toro is clever enough to approach his material with the right balance of sincerity and farce. Little in the movie is a fresh idea, especially not the hero’s battles with Nazis and mythic monsters, but Hellboy is one of those rare action films that brings a new spark of life to the familiar. Nearly every scene echoes of other capers, particularly the Indiana Jones trilogy, but it’s a pleasant evocation instead of a worn retread. It’s no surprise, for example, to find Hellboy engaged in a fistfight on a subway platform – I kept waiting for Hugo Weaving to show up – but it’s a nice touch to end the scene with the immortal hero edgily enduring the long process of being run over by a train. The whole movie is filled with such cheery riffs on time-honored tropes: it feels like an invigorating warm-up on a lukewarm cup of coffee.
The bright-if-cheesy visuals and snappy dialogue are aided by strong performances from the supporting cast, who acquit themselves well amongst the computer-generated hellhounds and otherworldly portals. John Hurt is particularly delightful as the good Professor Bruttenholm, Hellboy’s adopted daddy: his presence is welcome in a movie where the lead essentially declares, like Hurt’s Elephant Man, that he is not an animal, but a man. A big crimson man, with horns, but a man nonetheless.
As agreeable as this pronouncement is, Hellboy still ends up a little unsatisfying. It’s a very good movie that makes you want to see an even better one. Part of the problem may lie in tensions inherent to the source material. Many critics have noted Hellboy’s debt to the writings of horror master H. P. Lovecraft, and Hellboy certainly seems to be fighting Lovecraft’s hideous, squidlike Cthulhu in the final frames. But little of the uneasy dread of gothic horror makes it onto the screen. Much of the bone-chilling charm of the gothic lies in the slow, inexorable discovery of something unutterably awful within clanking Victorian machinery. But nothing in Hellboy is slow and, proving faithful to the medium of the comic strip, nothing much is unseen either. No wonder Roden’s Rasputin doesn’t look truly haunted: We see everything he sees, and it’s not that scary.