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Hellboy Dir: Guillermo del Toro Rating: M Now showing 
'Hellboy' was the culmination of of director Guillermo del Toro's long-cherished dream to make the film based on his favourite comic (rumour has it he turned down 'Harry Potter & The Prisoner Of Azkaban' to do it) and it's clearly a labour of love. The plot is heavily drawn from the Mike Mignola comic and involves the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, represented by Hellboy (Ron Perlman), fish-person Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and youthful new recruit John Myers (Rupert Evans) as they battle the resurrected Rasputin (Karel Rodin), his eternally youthful Nazi girlfriend Ilsa (Bridget Hodson) and undead clockwork assassin Kroenen (Ladislav Beran, who looks utterly fantastic) who are determined to open a portal to another dimension and bring about the end of the world via some beasts so Cthulu-like that the estate of HP Lovecraft should be calling their lawyers.The production design is excellent and the casting ranges from the spot-on (Perlman looks perfect - I mean, who else could play the role? - alongside John Hurt, who's typically great as Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, and Jeffrey Tambor, who's surprisingly solid as Dr Tom Manning) to the sub-par (Selma Blair's wishy-washy performance wastes the potentially fascinating character of Liz Sherman), although I hadn't imagined Sapien to sound quite so much like a cross between C-3PO and Niles from 'Frasier' (unsurprising perhaps, since an uncredited David Hyde Pierce supplies the voice). The dialogue errs on the quip-heavy side (Hellboy, writing a letter to Liz: "Hey Myers, what's a good, solid word for 'need'?" Myers: Well, 'need''s a good word." Hellboy: "Nah, too needy.") but is no worse than most films of the genre. So why did it feel so unsatisfying? Part of it is the underdeveloped romantic subplot between Hellboy and Liz; for example, Hellboy's intense jealousy over Myers and Liz seemed inexplicable given that they'd spent about 20 seconds of screen time together). Also, the villains of the piece are barely given a chance to do anything: Ilsa is barely a cipher while Rasputin is wildly overshadowed by Kroenen. But the biggest problem is the pacing: after a promising start it devolves into action scene followed by action scene followed by truncated piece of character development interrupted by monster attack followed by action scene. The overall impression is that the film was edited by a monkey with shears under orders to chop any scene that either contained more than a dozen lines of dialogue or lacked something bursting through a wall. The upshot, strangely, is a film that ends up feeling a whole lot longer than its scant 90-odd minutes. I mean, it could have been a lot worse - but, in these post-'Spider-Man' days, I know that it also could be have been a whole lot better.  |
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