Hellboy

Hellboy was a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps with the summer blockbuster season soon approaching I was expecting too much. Plus there was the entire buzz about how this was such a good movie. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad movie, I just didn’t love it. The premise reminded me of X-Men. A movie based on a comic book about a group of superheroes with special powers led by a secret organization to do good in the world. The lines between good and evil are blurred as they are tempted to use their powers for evil purposes but they cling to their humanity and remain good.

The problem here was that I didn’t understand the motivation of either the heroes or the villains. The heroes were good because the US government and Dr. Cook raised them that way. Only Hellboy has to make a decision whether to remain good or to open the gate to hell. The villains seem to be bad only for the sake of being bad. Maybe they like chaos but it is never dwelt upon. They are just evil and must be destroyed.

As I think about this I am reminded of one of the most basic of movie devices, the new guy. Here the new guy is John Myers played by Rupert Evans as a young agent transferred to the paranormal activities division to take over the handling of Hellboy. Now generally this gives the director and the writers a chance to catch the audience up on the background with snippets of plot exposition as the new guy is introduced to the system and the characters. Think of the ‘giant Twinkie’ speech in Ghostbusters that explained all of the ghost catching to Ernie Hudson. Unfortunately in Hellboy Agent Myers is thrown into the action with only the barest of introductions to the characters; we learn that Hellboy likes kittens and Baby Ruths and that his aquatic friend likes rotten eggs. Otherwise though the young agent asks the right questions everyone ignores him and the confusion of the audience.

There are a number of resurrection elements that I just didn’t get in this movie. If you can continually kill the Nazi assassin and his blood is dried out sand, what eventually keeps him dead? Because he has a big heavy cog on him? If you kill Samuel and he keeps splitting and generating twice as many, how does burning them all at once make them go away? Wouldn’t all of the beasts just multiply again? This is not sufficiently resolved for me. Plus, if Irina is a woman who doesn’t grow old and die and Rasputin keeps coming back how do you know either of them is dead? And the monster at the end might have been the most frighteningly big of all the evils, but he was also the easiest to kill. But there are tentacley demons and Hellboy kills them with fun and gusto.

The film does have a sense of humor that is admirable no more evident than that the panorama activities group is housed in an imposing Waste Management center in Newark New Jersey. There is also Hellboy’s sharp wit and his strange affection for cats, but other than a few clever remarks the plot runs surprisingly thin. Of course this is an action movie so maybe less is expected, but how many times does the old professor who raised the protagonist have to die at the hands of his enemy to motivate the hero? Can’t something else motivate him? In this case it would have been more interesting if Hellboy debated the goodness in him versus his design for evil based on his humanity or lack thereof, but that might be too deep for an action films so just kill his girlfriend and follow the numbers.

The music was very powerful and dramatic and reminded me of Phantom of the Opera and it fit well with the sewer scenes and dark violence. I thought that some of the effects could look better but for the most part Ron Perlman looks perfect and tangles with a variety of ancient beasties.

I guess the gist of this is that this movie delivers what is expected of an action film. A likeable character, some witty one liners, and a lot of monsters to kill. The problem is that it loses the audience in its motives and it doesn’t show us anything we haven’t seen before except a surly bright red superhero with one really big fist.