While I’ve never read the comics, I’ve been expecting Hellboy for quite a while. Director Guillermo del Toro did a good job with Blade II, maintaining a good rhythm to the story while making a hero look vulnerable and the opposition terrifying. Del Toro had also passed on both the next Blade movie and the third Harry Potter film in order to make Hellboy, because it had been his dream project for a while - that gave it a greater chance of being carefully crafted, with the respectful attention to detail that Bryan Singer brought to the X-Men movies. Plus, it seemed like Hellboy was going to be a sort of superheroed Delta Green (and I do mean that in a good way).
I confess, I had high hopes for the movie. That’ll bite you every time.
Hellboy is indeed a lot like a Delta Green scenario, with some superheroes and Catholic mythology thrown in the Lovecraftian mix. The beginning is pure DG - a group of soldiers on a mission to stop an envoy from Hitler and the Thule Society from opening a portal to release seven unspeakable gods, who are imprisoned in a crystal jail that looks suspiciously like Azathoth. The Nazi team is led by Grigori, a shadowy, robe-wearing, mechanical-glove donning wizard that will open the portal for the old gods to return, and who would be a lot more impressive if he didn’t speak just like that Russian kitty from Cats & Dogs.
Pay no mind, I tell myself, he’ll be gone soon. Everybody but the bad guys know that chaining yourself to a mechanical monstrosity, in order to invoke some apocalyptic power at the very beginning of the movie, is a one way ticket into the ether. Soon enough, Grigori Rasputin is sent off into that lounge in the sky where villains that never die spent their holidays, in order to wait for the sequel while his cohorts, Ilsa the walking cliche and Kroenen the assassin (and the coolest bad guy I’ve seen in a while) deal with this movie.
No such luck, buddy. No more than five minutes later Rasputin is back, stealing Kroenen’s rightful spotlight and relegating Ilsa to even less of a position that she would otherwise have had. But let’s leave our R-dragging mastermind aside for now. He’ll be in the shadows for a bit anyway.
When Rasputin is off the screen, as he mostly is on the first two thirds of the movie, it progresses quite well. It has a good combination of humanity and action, sprinkled with Call of Cthulhu-like library research, reliquaries to ward off evil and small diversions into what makes a person and why we are not just what we look like. The sense of humor is just right, and while the movie suffers from the fact that we can’t worry about Hellboy (he seems to be indestructible), it does balance it out by placing Abe Sapiens, the psychic, literate amphibian, in mortal danger.
That, unfortunately, will be the last time you’ll ever feel suspense in this movie.
The last third of the movie, initiated by a shake up in the organization that happens just as we’re getting to know the characters, has them taking off for Russia in order to eliminate the Ultimate Evil. Suddenly the movie forgets about research, relics, spells and characters, and becomes one big race to firebomb as many things as possible. Kroenen is dispatched ignominiously fast, beasties are napalmed left and right, Ilsa is revealed for the Obligatory Bad Female that she is and eventually a Chtonian-like beast emerges from the body of Rasputin to wreak havoc upon the world.
Only to be stopped by those pesky boys and their fire grenades.
It’s like in the middle of the session, some munchkin in the party realized that a) they were ìmpervious to fire and b) nothing else was - not even gods. You can imagine that the session was over pretty quickly after that.
Potential a movie does not make.
It is Delta Green with superheroes. In a schizophrenic, decidely not-good sort of way.
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