 |
|||
 |
 |
||
 | |||
 | |||||||||||
|
|
A Sony release. Written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro; starring Ron Perlman and Selma Blair.  It’s a rather commonly held view in Hollywood that actors and directors often take on the headaches of working on the lowest-common-denominator, big-budget studio films so that they can afford to work on the small no-budget projects that appeal to their more artistic sides. Charlize Theron took a role in The Italian Job and then went on to do the more intimate project Monster, for which she won an Oscar. Nick Nolte did Hulk and then appeared in the decidedly smaller The Good Thief. Even Denzel Washington supplements his mainstream films with art house projects like Antwone Fisher. Since the actors and directors actually exhibit a genuine love for these ‘passion projects’ (accepting scale pay for a movie allows one to draw this conclusion), the end results tend to be that much more interesting and energetic than the run-of-the-mill studio projects. Hellboy was writer/director Guillermo Del Toro’s passion project. Ignore the temptation to shrug this statement off because Hellboy is a comic book movie; Del Toro spent two years of his life working on Blade II in order to prove to the future financiers of Hellboy that he could work with cutting edge special effects. And rather surprisingly for a passion project some seven years in the making, Hellboy is completely lacking any kind of heart. Adapted from the comic book of the same name, Hellboy is a shockingly formulaic superhero flick about a tall, red creature from Hell (complete with horns and a tail) who fights crime and assorted paranormal bad guys (Hellboy is eerily reminscent of Men in Black in a number of different ways). Brought to Earth by a Nazi experiment gone awry, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) now works for a top-secret wing of the FBI. When former Russian all around bad guy Gregori Rasputin (Karel Roden) comes back from the dead in an attempt to control the world (he made a deal with several very shady Gods to do just that if resurrected), it’s up to Hellboy and his friends to stop the wily monk.  Though it isn’t really worth anyone’s while to see Hellboy, Del Toro’s film has two truly stellar things working for it: Hellboy looks fantastic, and Perlman is exceptional in the lead role. As with all superhero movies, save for a few moments in Daredevil, the special effects that Del Toro and crew mastered on Blade II appear in an even more pristine form here. When Hellboy and company battle beasts from another world, it truly looks like Hellboy and company are battling beasts from another world. The backdrops, often a combination of matte painting, blue screen and an original plate, set a phenomenal scene for the action. Combined with the fact that Perlman’s gruff charm and off-kilter panache were practically made for a superhero like Hellboy,--a superhero who isn’t quite sure that he’s a superhero–Hellboy looks primed to deliver a rousing adventure in the most spectacular of fashions. When the results of this movie echoed hollowly and it became obvious that Hellboy was merely another in the long line of overblown comic book films with little depth or feeling, it hurt a little more than usual; Del Toro’s project seemed like it could have succeeded with just a little extra time and care. In and of itself, this statement is cause for pause, given that Del Toro worked on this project for, at his count, seven years. At what point do you question how much more time was needed in order to develop the characters more fully and to at least explain how Rasputin’s right hand man was able to fight so well given that he was filled entirely with sand? It’s possible that Del Toro’s original script for Hellboy was edgy, clever and filled with numerous three-dimensional characters that would have leapt off the screen and was then made more mainstream (read: dumbed down) in order to secure the $60+ million of funding necessary. Sadly, in the end, despite the fact that Del Toro poured his heart and soul into Hellboy, the final cut of this film is as deeply flawed and as intensely shallow a work as just about any of the other recent superhero films.
chris neumer yes, it's true: Selma Blair attended Kalamazoo College for a short while before pursuing acting on a more full time basis. |
| |||||
