[Chuck Mayer]

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I have to wear my heart on my sleeve. I love Hellboy the comic. I love it. I basically quit collecting comics a few years back, though I pick up the occasional story here and there. But I still buy Alex Ross stuff. And I always buy Hellboy. A little (quick) history. Hellboy was the first creator-owned comic for Mike Mignola. While the boys at Image were getting rich, a few of the best talents in the biz formed the Legend imprint at Dark Horse Comics...Frank Miller, Paul Chadwick, Mike Mignola, Art Adams, John Byrne, Geof Darrow (of The Matrix fame) and Mike Allred. In a dark period of comics (speculation and X-clones abounded, die-cut/foil covers, series lasting three issues, and little actual quality), Legend was a guarantee. I had no expectations for Hellboy the comic a decade ago. I simply knew Mignola was drawing it. And Mike Mignola can DRAW. And when I mean DRAW, I mean DRAW. As in any field, there's a bell curve of talent. Some folks don't belong, most can do the job, and there are precious few who transcend the genre. Mike Mignola is special. No clutter. His simplicity went unappreciated for a while, but couldn't be ignored. The man draws the best stuff in the biz. So I bought Hellboy.

And fell in love with the concept, characters, and world. Hellboy *is* a blue-collar stiff, with the weight of Armageddon on his right hand, and he lives in one of the best fantasy worlds ever imagined. Mike is a devotee of Lovecraftian horror, and mixes in myths, legends, and tall tales. Castles are haunted, the dead can talk, and Nazis are not only evil, but EVIL. It's lyrically beautiful, and Hellboy is a great guide.

That's just where I am coming from

On to the movie. I can't believe how much they got right. They got the right actor, the right director, and they didn't compromise any more than any other adaptation. Perlman embodies the character, which isn't easy. The supporting cast is excellent. The sets and shots are beautiful. It's a great looking movie that gets it right. And I only liked it on the first pass. I think I wanted to love it so much, I didn't let the film come to me. I wasn't let down, I was simply underwhelmed. I DO NOT BLAME THE FILM. Nor do I make excuses for it. It felt overly long, there were a few awkward transitions, and it feels edited. Too little on the villains as well...any monster movie needs to spend a little more time on the villains. Amazingly, I think the longer version will feel shorter...if that makes any sense But I did like the film. I just wanted to love it. Beyond my expectations, however, is the simple truth that Mignola's art cannot be translated into the "real world" so easily. I am not an artist, so I can't explain it, but there it is.

I give it a hearty recommendation, however. It has energy and style to spare. Again, Perlman does a great job in the best makeup I have ever seen. Rick Baker (and team) are brilliant, and I expect this film to win that Oscar in a walk. But then I expected Rick Baker to win Makeup in 2001 for POTA, so what do I know (it was a travesty...and by that I mean POTA the film , and Baker losing/not being nominated). There are some amazing shots in the film, and del Toro clearly wants to do some Lovecraft. There is an early shot (SPOILER) where a light is sucked into space and drifts over Ogdru Jahad...stunning work. Great action, decent plot (which summarizes the comics as well), and quite a bit of humor (sometimes a little TOO much for me). I expected it to be a bit more tongue in cheek. The monster work was excellent

In short, as you can see, expectations got in my way. It's not fair to the film (or myself), so I plan on seeing it again rather soon. If you are on the fence (...you quit reading five paragraphs back ), give it a shot. It's got a good heart. I eagerly await the DC in 8 months time

8/10

Take care,
Chuck

P.S. I hope to edit this on a second viewing.

[Robert Crawford]

This thread is now the Official Review Thread for "Hellboy". Please post all HTF member reviews in this thread.

Any other comments, links to other reviews, or discussion items will be deleted from this thread without warning!

If you need to discuss those type of issues then I have designated an Official Discussion Thread.



Crawdaddy

[Donnie Eldridge]

I just got back from watching the movie and I have to agree with you. The movie felt overly long and they didn't focus enough on the villains. The humor was good, but with a couple of exceptions the trailers spoiled most of the one liners. It's a good movie, but this is one that is going to be better served with DC cut version on dvd.

[Shawn_KE]

I just got back from seeing the film. I've never read Hellboy comic or knew exactly what it was about, just Mignola did it. So I really don't know what was right or wrong, other than it being a good movie.

The pace was decent, but felt long in area's. The one liners were funny without coming off corney. I was impressed with the CGI as well.

Also, what was up with the blades guy winding up that switch in his chest?

[JonZ]

out of 4 s

[Phil Florian]

I saw this at a sadly thin showing last night. I and the 3 guys I went with had a blast, though. 2 of us were fans of the comics and loved all the bits in the movie that were taken directly from it and the other two just like good movies and enjoyed it from beginning to end.

Ron Perlman is perfect as Hellboy. He made a very sympathetic hero who has to deal not only with his past but with his desire to fit in with others. I liked the supporting cast a lot as well. The effects were very, very good in my opinion. For example, it was hard to tell where Abe Sapien the costume left off for Abe Sapien the CGI character. There was no "fight in front of the lights" from Blade 2 in this movie. While it was effects laden, the character of Hellboy didn't really get lost in it, even when it was over the top set pieces.

This was in some ways (to me, anyway) the inheritor of the Indiana Jones mantle. Pulpy action/adventure with a global scope and a mix of metaphysical and also intimate consequences. Yes, the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of the folks at the BPRD but more important was whether or not Hellboy gets the girl.

Del Toro is an amazing director and really showed his love for the character. While the film was very true to the comics, it wasn't a rote re-telling (like the Potter movies so far) nor a blatant scene for scene homage without any connecting tissue (Daredevil, bah). They took a premise from a cool story "The Corpse" and used it in a different way but a way that is "true" to the original storyline. They took the origin Story "Seed of Destruction" and did the same, keeping true to much of the comic but making the changes that make it work for the big screen. Nicely done.

A must see for fans of comics or just fans of old school adventure movies that haven't been done right since that guy with the fedora and whip.


out of


Ciao,

Phil

[Jason Seaver]

½ (out of four)

Hellboy is the sort of movie that often elicits comments like "it's full of ridiculous things, but it works because it doesn't take itself seriously." This couldn't be further from the truth; Hellboy has all sort of funny things going on in the corners of the movie, and its monstrous-looking but down-to-earth title character does make with the jokes, but this is not the result of the film and the filmmakers not taking themselves seriously. It's the opposite; that sort of attention to detail points to everyone involved taking the project very seriously, and getting it exactly right. Sloppy movies like Independence Day and Armageddon don't take themselves seriously; Hellboy is better than that.

This would be a frighteningly easy movie to screw up, but director Guillermo del Toro embraces the weird world of Mike Mignola's "Hellboy"/"BPRD" (Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense) comics and makes it hold together. Most superhero movies, because of budget constraints or a desire to keep grounded for the non-geek audience, give us a world with one superhero and one supervillain; Hellboy not only gives us the title character, a demon brought into our world as a baby and raised by his discoverer as a son, but it also gives us fish-man Abe Sapien (body by Doug Jones, voice by an uncredited David Hyde Pierce), firestarter Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), Grigori "yes that" Rasputin (Karel Roden), an immortal Nazi, a hundred-year-old assassin who has replaced much of his body with mechanical parts whose "blood has dried up so that only dust flows in his veins", space-born Lovecraftian monsters, demonic frog-creatures, and more. Nice-but-normal FBI agent John Myers (Rupert Evans), likely meant to be the audience's viewpoint character, practically vanishes into the woodwork.

The story, based upon Mignola's "Seed Of Destruction" miniseries, is as straightforward as these things can be - sixty years ago, the Nazis attempted to summon a demon army, but the US Army got the drop on them, and all that got through was a baby. Now, sixty years later, that baby is a man (demons don't age quite as quickly as you and me) working for the BPRD division of the FBI, handling supernatural threats to the United States. But Rasputin's lover, whom he blessed with long life and youth, and the clockwork assassin have brought the mad monk back, and he intends to pick up where he left off. But to do that, he apparently needs to draw Hellboy out, releasing a frog demon into a New York museum and causing a setback in his friend Liz's attempt to control her powers.

Hellboy's world is well-realized. This should be no surprise; both del Toro and Mignola (who serves as an associate producer and design consultant) are perhaps best known for their visual styles. The effects are very good, maybe a little less polished than you'd get from Star Wars, but mostly believable and solid looking (though nobody has yet gotten the "digital stuntman" quite right). It's got its moments of comic-book absurdity (where are the giant pendulums that smash a catwalk coming from?), but it all fits together, too.

It fits together, mostly, because of Ron Perlman's performance in the title role. An old hand at working under a lot of prosthetic makeup, Perlman knows how to exaggerate his body language just enough to make up for having so much of his face covered up without entering ham territory. Despite being an actor in his fifties playing a sixty-year-old demon, he portrays Hellboy as emotionally in his late teens; he has a temper, clashes with his adopted father (John Hurt), and has a crush on Liz, amusingly following her and Myers when they go out for coffee. Indeed, that scene where he's watching her while talking to a nine-year-old boy he meets up on the roof is the fulcrum on which the movie rests; he looks like the devil himself but is in many ways a confused kid struggling to become a man his father can be proud of.

I hope Hellboy makes a ridiculous amount of money, enough to get everyone back to do "Wake The Devil", sell a bunch of comic book collections, get me action figures to put on my shelf, and allow more fantasies with this amount of imagination to be made. It's a hugely entertaining movie.

[Steve_Tk]

I enjoyed the movie, but for the most part didn't follow it as much as I would seeing it a second time (which will be DVD).

I didn't really enjoy the villains, partly because that one guy swings his blades around way too much and for me at least, went from being someone to be feared to something that is kind of silly.

I did enjoy Hellboy himself though. I was just kind of lost as to who he was.

Overall I think it just did not flow as well as it could have. I was not sure about the motivations and did not feel as epic (not the right word I'm looking for) as maybe Xmen2.