Hellboy getting glowing reviews

[FlyingDonut]

Washington Post:

 

'Hellboy' a Heck of a Good Time

 

By Richard Harrington

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, April 2, 2004; Page WE43

 

"MAKE NO mistake about it, there are things out there that go bump in the night? We're the ones who bump back."

 

Which explains Hellboy, go-to guy at the clandestine Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

 

And when Hellboy bumps back, consider yourself seriously bumped. After all, he's straight outta hell, or some similar cosmic bad neighborhood, summoned at the end of World War II by desperate Nazis and their occultist allies, including mad monk Grigori Rasputin. The bad guys hope to turn the tide of history by bringing into our world (via the inevitable interdimensional portal) a creature who will ignite Armageddon. What they get is a not-so-little red-skinned baby with mini-horns, a tail and a powerfully thick club of a right hand. Also unanticipated: the American GIs who rescue said tyke on delivery and saddle him with that memorable nickname.

 

Hellboy is adopted by mission leader Professor Broom (John Hurt), who is soon heading the secretive B.P.R.D. Years later, the semi-adult Hellboy (Ron Perlman) has been groomed to overcome his origins. Now a Hulkish giant (red, not green) who sands down his horns every morning in order to contain his evil impulses, he's on call to keep the world safe from paranormal menaces to society. At the Bureau's secret headquarters, Hellboy works out with weights, eats junk food, smokes fat cigars, watches television and pays no attention to an inexplicable brood of cats he shares quarters with. Like a plumber, he waits to clean up sudden messy monster problems, a blue-collar fixer in the tradition of "Ghostbusters."

 

And yet Hellboy's a total romantic wreck as he pines for the beautiful but morose pyro-kinetic, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair).

 

Welcome to the world of "Hellboy," first imagined a decade ago in Mike Mignola's Dark Horse Comics series and now brought to the big screen in a faithful yet imaginative expansion by director Guillermo Del Toro. Del Toro is no stranger to genre film ("Blade II," "Mimic"), but "Hellboy" is more akin to the Mexican director's brilliant debut, "Cronos," one of the most compelling vampire films of the last 20 years. "Hellboy" has some problems -- several of its basic conflicts are as mundanely familiar as its evil creatures -- but from an opening Black Mass sequence that's pure "Indiana Jones," Del Toro moves his story along with unrelenting energy and wit while introducing the opposing parties with admirable efficiency.

 

And though Perlman may not be a hugely bankable name for a potential franchise, he's perfect for the role. It's not the first time Perlman has worked with Del Toro (he was in "Cronos" and "Blade II"), or the first time he has labored under heavy makeup and prosthetics (television's "Beauty and the Beast," the Lawsayer in "The Island of Dr. Moreau," ultra-primitive Man in "Quest for Fire"). That may explain how the hulking, long-jawed actor is able to illuminate Hellboy from within, making what he calls "the whole 'lonely hero' thing" credible, even as his sheer bulk makes believable Hellboy's agile/mobile/hostile behavior. It helps immeasurably that Hellboy's impressive visage comes courtesy of makeup master Rick Baker and that the -script (by Del Toro, drawing heavily from Mignola's comics) supports his "been there, crushed that" attitude with droll asides that never descend to predictable Schwarzeneggerian quips.

 

A reawakened Rasputin seeks to reclaim Hellboy to his original task with the help of Sammael (Brian Steele), the fertile "hound of the resurrection" (each time he's killed, two new slimy Sammaels appear), and Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), a surgical addict/killing machine. Thankfully, Hellboy has his own crew, the erudite telepathic merman Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, voiced by an uncredited David Hyde Pierce), fire-starter Liz and FBI agent John Myers (Rupert Evans). Some of the sweetest, funniest, most humanizing moments attend Hellboy's pathetic fits of jealousy at a budding romance between Liz and John that threatens his own "beauty and the beast" aspirations. Eventually, there's a showdown. Not between Hellboy and John, but between Hellboy and Rasputin's evil minions and Sammael's spawn.

 

Del Toro shows genuine empathy for comic book culture and conventions and enlists like-minded cohorts, notably production designer Stephen Scott, cinematographer Guillermo Navarro and composer Marco Beltrami, whose orchestral score lends dramatic weight to the action. But it's Perlman who carries "Hellboy" on his broad shoulders, and unlike such failed cinematic translations as the unanimated Daredevil and computer-generated Hulk, you'll be wanting to see more of him in the future.

 

"HELLBOY" (PG-13, 112 minutes) -- Contains the requisite comic book violence. Area theaters.

[FlyingDonut]

Salon:

 

"Hellboy"

A dazzling comic-book movie that doesn't lose site of its characters, or its "Passion"-worthy moral underpinning.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By Stephanie Zacharek

 

April 2, 2004 | Less violence, more poetry: For believers and nonbelievers alike, the big Catholic movie to see this season is not Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" but Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy." "Hellboy" is based on a comic -- the Dark Horse series of the same name by Mike Mignola -- and not on the Gospels, and its hero is a butt-kicking, resolutely working-class red demon, as opposed to a peaceable prophet. But like most stories based on comic books, "Hellboy" has a deeply moral underpinning, and that's not lost on del Toro: The movie riffs on the idea that the seeds of both good and evil are within all of us, and we choose which ones to cultivate. In the picture's final scene, a character wonders aloud, What makes a man a man? The answer, he decides, is that "it's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but rather, how he decides to end them." "Hellboy" is like a catechism class run by the X-Men.

 

Which is to say that watching it is a pleasure rather than a chore: The religious undercurrents of "Hellboy" are metaphorical rather than tediously literal. Del Toro may be fully in touch with the pageantry of Catholicism; the movie's imagery includes a beautiful woman enrobed in blue flames and a rosary with supernatural powers. But "Hellboy" doesn't exist to instruct or to preach at us. If anything, del Toro ("Blade II," "The Devil's Backbone") proves that stylishness is its own kind of spirituality. "Hellboy" is one of the most poetic comic-book adaptations to come along in years, yet it never loses its sense of lightness and fun -- del Toro gives it just enough screwball nuttiness to keep it from bogging down. When good triumphs over evil in "Hellboy," as it inevitably does, we don't feel as if we've been run over by a steamroller; instead, we're buoyed up and held aloft. The gravity of this comic-book movie is virtually weightless.

 

In the prologue to "Hellboy," we learn that during World War II, the Nazis were holed up on a remote Scottish isle, busying themselves with a secret plan: Via a goose-step-voodoo commingling of science and black magic, they would rule the world by unleashing an unspeakable evil. The plan is foiled, for the time being at least, by the Allied forces and their guide, a brainy professor by the name of Trevor Broom. But the mastermind behind the plot, the evil Gregor Rasputin (yes, that Rasputin, who, it turns out, never really died at all but has unlocked the secret of everlasting life), manages to disappear through a supernatural portal just in the nick of time, which means he'll surely appear later -- sometime in the early 2000s, as it turns out -- to stir up more trouble.

 

As Broom and the Allied soldiers explore the island, they come upon a slimy red infant with a curvy, twitching tail, nascent, stumpy horns emerging from his forehead and a right forearm that looks like a small block of concrete. Broom lures the frightened creature into his arms with a Baby Ruth candy bar, and takes him home to raise him as if he were his son. Hellboy (Ron Perlman), as Broom and the soldiers come to call him, grows up to be a strapping, weight-lifting, cantankerous, scarlet-skinned, beer-guzzling hunk of a man who's not a man at all but a demon. As a baby, he was brought to earth by Rasputin as a harbinger of the Armageddon, but under Broom's care, he has instead turned into a champion and protector of all that is good, fending off every giant, hungry, moist, tentacled critter that threatens to destroy humanity.

 

And, as it turns out, there are a lot of them, thanks to the nefarious Rasputin (played with gleaming deviousness by Karel Roden), who reappears on earth hoping to get his previously scuttled plan back on track. Hellboy doesn't have to work alone: He's part of an extended family of misfits (not unlike those bigger comic-book legends, the X-Men) that includes his adoptive father, Broom (John Hurt, in a touching, finely calibrated performance); an elegant, telepathic fish-man named Abe Sapiens (he's played with boundless grace by Doug Jones; David Hyde-Pierce provides his voice) who can read four books at once, provided there's someone around to turn the pages for him; a forthright yet shy young woman, Liz Sherman (the demurely deadpan Selma Blair), who can start fires at will with her fingertips; and a young Secret Service type, John Myers (Rupert Evans), who has been assigned to look after Hellboy but who also finds himself attracted to Liz, oblivious of the fact that Hellboy himself is not so secretly in love with her.

 

There's also a svelte, sand-filled, metal-masked puppet-man who runs on windup clockworks, but let's not get ahead of ourselves: The plot of "Hellboy" (it was adapted by del Toro and Peter Briggs) may be convoluted, but it at least appears to make sense while you're watching it, which is more than you can say for most modern thrillers.

 

But the story line of "Hellboy" hardly matters at all. This is the kind of movie you watch for its aura, for its appealing characters, for its marvelously sustained seriocomic romantic mood. Particularly in its treatment of the relationship between Hellboy and Liz, there are times when "Hellboy" resembles Bryan Singer's "X-Men," one of the few other recent comic-book adaptations that understood that comics aren't just about action, but also about mood and language and lyricism. Even though cinematographer Guillermo Navarro makes "Hellboy" look rich and expensive -- its color palette is all smoky reds and muted, steely grays -- the movie doesn't have the extravagant, noisy flash of the X-Men pictures: It's more intimate and more organic than either "X-Men" or its clumsier sequel "X2." The production design, by Stephen Scott, is often reminiscent of that of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "City of Lost Children" (in which Perlman also appeared). The movie's imagery is drawn from dreams that teeter on the edge of nightmares: There are giant silvery clock gears, a Russian cemetery draped in snow like crocheted lace, and a huge, shining moon that's both benevolent and threatening. In one of the movie's loveliest scenes, Hellboy and Liz sit in the quiet nighttime garden of a mental hospital, surrounded by small trees that have been wrapped in plastic and lit from within like translucent Chinese lanterns.

 

Like Tim Burton (whose "Batman" remains one of the finest comic-book adaptations of all time) before him, del Toro understands that the look of a comic-book movie can go a long way in setting its tone. But he isn't so obsessed with surfaces that he loses sight of his characters, and that's particularly important when it comes to orchestrating a movie around a lead actor who's hidden beneath pounds of makeup and prosthetics, as Perlman is here. His performance is brazenly delicate: On the surface, Hellboy is something of a hellraiser, but Perlman lets us see straight into his smoldering soul. In his downtime Hellboy lifts weights and puffs on stubby stogies (simultaneously, no less). He has no patience for foolish people and stupid questions: When poor Agent Myers notices that a sticky, gooey, bloodthirsty critter has affixed itself to Hellboy's arm, he blurts out, "What's that?" to which Hellboy replies crustily, "Lemme go ask."

 

But Hellboy also has a great fondness for cats (as pets and not, thank goodness, as snacks) and his living quarters are crawling with them -- they mew and clamber and twitch their tails just as restlessly as Hellboy twitches his. Del Toro treats Hellboy's tenderness as a delectable joke (at one point he rescues a crate full of kittens from a subway platform that's about to be demolished by a massive creepy-crawly), but he also knows it's the linchpin of the movie, the immovable center around which it rotates. When Hellboy attempts to confess his love to Liz, he mutters an apology about the way his face looks, passing his giant, clumsy hand dismissively across his perilous-rock-ledge brow and his barely present nose, which manages to be both hooked and flattened at the same time (although it is also mysteriously fine and noble). Left to their own devices, his horns would be giant, water-buffalo-style affairs, but he files them down to nubs that look like big slices of pepperoni -- "to fit in," as one character wryly puts it.

 

Next to Blair, who is fine-boned and tiny, Perlman's Hellboy is a rough, hulking thing; you can understand why he wouldn't even feel entitled to touch her. But even from beneath those layers of makeup and costuming, Perlman radiates gentleness and warmth. It's no surprise that these two misfits -- one of whom looks completely normal but who also, unfortunately, has the power to inadvertently fry entire villages with her mere touch -- find comfort in each other. Hellboy, like many (if not most) comic-book heroes, is an outcast who has turned his oddities and flaws into a brilliant advantage. But having superpowers doesn't mean you can escape pain; it may, in fact, mean that you're destined to suffer more of it. That's a Catholic idea if ever there was one, but instead of focusing on the brutality of it, del Toro helps us see its beauty. It's the kind of X-ray vision more filmmakers could use.

[FlyingDonut]

New York Times:

 

Horror Comic at the Core, With a Soulful Sweetness

By ELVIS MITCHELL

 

ike Mignola's "Hellboy" comics have a drizzly, musty gothic ambience — the same fetid air that H. P. Lovecraft circulated in his fiction. The writer and director Guillermo del Toro has brought a similar woozy, disconcerting melancholy to his film adaptation, and his obvious affection and affinity for that dankness alone would make "Hellboy" worth seeing. But Mr. del Toro lets loose with an all-American, vaudevillian rambunctiousness that makes the movie daffy, loose and lovable.

 

For Mr. del Toro, this is hard-core. He turned down a shot at directing the third "Harry Potter" film because he nurtured a need to bring Mr. Mignola's colossal, monstrous-looking, Twizzler-colored champion to the screen. The director's determination pays off, mostly, as a dreamy mating of filmmaker, craft and material.

 

He also multiplied what Mr. Mignola (and John Byrne, who wrote the -script of the comic series "Seed of Destruction," from which the movie comes) envisioned by casting Ron Perlman in the lead, an actor whose unruffled, seedy dynamism gives Hellboy a raffish soulfulness. Mr. del Toro's concentration and visible love of the material and Mr. Perlman's witty and intuitive performance keep the movie afloat when the action sequences threaten to make it routine. Mr. Perlman enriches the film with emotional complication, giving Hellboy's vanity a piquancy. This devilish beast files down the horns on his head and has the swagger of a hipster mutant who takes pleasure in swatting down evil and exhaling plumes of smoke from a constant stream of cigars.

 

The story is pretty complicated. During World War II, Hitler, apparently anticipating story elements of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," sends a special squad led by Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden), the mad, mad monk, to rend the interdimensional barriers and obtain a creature that will give the edge to the Nazis. Given that the Nazis' black-magic squad has the unkillable Kroenen (Ladislav Beran) slicing through the Allies with a pair of gleaming retractable blades, you have to ask how much more of an edge does the Third Reich need? (If Hitler had access to just one of the superassassins assigned to him in the movies, we'd be living in a very different world today.)

 

Rasputin accomplishes his otherworldly task with a whirling device that sends blue-white bolts through the countryside and also looks like the logo of one of the film's financiers, Revolution Studios. Rasputin's conjuring leads to the emergence of an infant creature, red as sin, with a long tail, who falls into the hands of the Allies. The kindly British scientist Dr. Broom (John Hurt) tames the tiny scarlet devil with a Baby Ruth the size of a bazooka. Adopted by Dr. Broom, Hellboy, with his huge, stonelike left arm, becomes the go-to guy for the good doctor and the antiapparition league known as the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

 

The movie shifts to the modern day, when that bureau is run by the snarling Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), who's growing tired of coming up with lies to hide Hellboy's existence. He's charged with maintaining both Hellboy, who consumes mass quantities of food and beer, and the sensitive psychic Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), the water-dweller with the flesh of a trout (and a sonorous voice supplied by David Hyde Pierce). A new agent is assigned to baby-sit the pair, the nervous John Myers (Rupert Evans).

 

And when Rasputin and his ageless Nazi love, the she-wolf Ilsa (Bridget Hodson), let loose another dangerous force on the world, the lizardlike Sammael (Brian Steele), the situation requires the reactivation of a bureau agent, Liz (Selma Blair). Liz has pyro-telekinetic abilities she can barely control, not to mention another fiery-red power she cannot contain: Hellboy, whose crush on her is as mountainous as his appetite. (Ms. Blair's heavy-lidded eyes seem to be at half mast from some lovely lewd fantasy. With her sleepy carnality and dry, hesitant timing, she is a superb foil for Mr. Perlman's plain-spoken bravado. If you look like Hellboy, why hide anything?)

 

When Agent Myers, a mere mortal, gets into the middle of things, he seems to be a greater immediate threat than the immortal Sammael, who is reborn as two separate Sammaels every time he's killed. There's also a greater imminent threat: the destiny that Rasputin hints for Hellboy.

 

It's tough to bring a comic-book character to movie life because the incestuous homage that comics pay to one another is so prevalent. The ragtag group of unwanted, neurotic heroes feels like the X-Men, and the seat of evil that Rasputin and his team occupy has been seen in a thousand B pictures. Without the idiosyncratic boldness that the original artists convey on the page — like Mr. Mignola's art, with its Expressionist woodcut cartoonishness — comics-based movies often only echo what's come before in narrative terms.

 

What distinguishes "Hellboy" from the pack and gives it squirmy, ferocious life is the environment that Mr. del Toro creates on screen. The movie is lubricated with a fluid, slimy menace, and the director's love of rotted, desiccated flesh and exposed, traumatized organs adds an engrossing grossness. But a contrasting vulnerability has also been slipped in, a critical addition. When Abe Sapien goes off to investigate a Sammael appearance, there's a mounting awareness of how ill suited he is to an encounter with this slavering hybrid.

 

And the jealous Hellboy, stalking Myers and Liz on a date, vaults from rooftop to rooftop and ends up chatting about life and love with a 9-year-old boy from whom he filches cookies and milk. And when Manning and Hellboy's gruffness come nose to nose, the tension between them melts when Manning gives his charge a paternal and accurate lecture on how to light a cigar properly.

 

Mr. del Toro avidly lavishes this texture on "Hellboy," which opens nationwide today, giving it a kiss of distinction. It's an elegant haunted house of a picture with dread and yearning part of the eeriness. Mr. Perlman's mastery of bad-tempered volubility makes "Hellboy" a kind of screwball-comedy version of the Thing from the "Fantastic Four" comics. Like any American comedy protagonist, he's always trying to explain himself and do what's right. That ambition is what gets him into trouble and is the truest definition of hell.

[jeff2004]

I got a special 10 minute preview DVD of Hellboy from Best Buy and it looks awesome. I am just surprised I have never heard of Hellboy until I saw the movie preview.

[JiveTurkeyMoFo]

I saw the movie yesterday, so allow me to present a brief laymen's review:

 

The movie was, overall, very enjoyable. The special effects were as good, or better, then those of any other "Comic Book" movie (Hulk & Spider-Man included). I was truly surprised and pleased. The storyline was a little convoluted, with a standard Hollywood ending that I thought did the rest of the movie a disservice. Other then that, the jokes, the characters, the fight scenes, the special effects all made it worthwile viewing.