Hellboy
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Starring Ron Perlman Selma Blair
Columbia
Rated PG-13
132 mins
Grade: B
Ron Perlman is not a famous actor. With those heavy, stone-faced features of his, he’s become one of those “that guy” guys – the actors you recognize but don’t know, unless you’re the kind of obsessive genre fanboys who pour each issue of Fangoria and Cinescape with a fine-toothed comb.
He’s probably best known as the soulful, leonine hero in the TV soap opera “Beauty and the Beast”, but with “Hellboy,” based on the underground comic created by Mike Mignola, Perlman is given the chance to take the lead in an expansive, fantastical sci-fi action adventure (courtesy of Guillermo Del Toro, the ultimate fanboy director.)
It’s an opportunity he makes the best of. Perlman makes Hellboy, a blood-red demon who fights on the side of good, jocular and brash, a superhero with the gruffly laidback demeanor of a working-class average Joe. It’s a witty way to portray a savior of the world (everyone knows most comic book good guys are usually presented as brooding, tortured messiahs) and it gives the movie a giddy charge.
As presented here, Hellboy looks like the kind of hulking Technicolored monstrosity that you’d usually find on your average episode of “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.” But he acts like the guy you find playing darts at the bar. Hellboy is a superhero with a fondness for beer and Baby Ruth bars, a weakness for cats and kittens and an even bigger one for Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) the pretty, but troubled, pyrokinetic love who has holed herself up in an institution to learn to control her powers.
The world of “Hellboy” is one in which ancient evil exists, but it’s the kind of non-religious evil wherein all the devils and demons are afraid of Catholic symbols not because God exists, but because its old literary tradition. It opens in Scotland during World War II, when Allied soldiers – lead by a British paranormal expert in a tweedy jacket – stop the mad monk Rasputin (yes, that very Rasputin) from opening up a portal to hell and allowing the “Seven Gods of Chaos” to spill into our world this allowing Hitler to win the war. They manage to close it, but not before one little thing slips through: a tiny red baby devil with a stone for a right hand.
The expert, “Broom” Bruttenholm (he grows up to be the wizened John Hurt), adopts the little creature, gives him the nom-de-Hades Hellboy, and raises him as a son; the action cuts to present day when a 60-ish Hellboy (his aging process, however, makes him seem 20-ish) is now the resident muscle for the FBI’s Bureau of Paranormal Investigation and Research.
Trouble brews when Rasputin is raised from the dead – after “The Passion of the Christ,” “Dawn of the Dead” and now this, it’s become quite a year for the those being raised from the beyond – to continue wreaking havoc on the world. The havoc starts with the releasing of the monster Sammael, which looks like a cross between the Alien and Kothoga form “The Relic.”
Del Toro may be modern cinema’s first legitimate horror auteur. He works in a visual palette of icy blacks and grays, the cool, the bleached hues of a New England winter’s morning. The only colors of vivid life are the red smear that is Hellboy and the vibrant neon blue when Liz bursts into flames, white-hot fire whipping and twisting with elegant grace around her body. Like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, he’s a director indebted to the culture of fanboy-ism; he’s a pop-fantasist on the highest scale. “Hellboy” is a big-budget special FX spectacle, but it’s one made with the artful, polished beauty of real moviemaking.
The movie is not just an action film. It’s also a romance, a genuinely lovely one at that. Perlman and Blair share a sweet misfit chemistry, and it gives Perlman a chance to indulge in his softer side – he brings to Hellboy a touching, soulful vulnerability. The triangle that develops between Red (as he’s nicknamed), Liz and the boyish new agent (Rupert Evans) assigned to watch over the hulking demon is a bit pat – we know where its headed anyway – but it still has a tinge of romantic feeling.
“Hellboy” differs from your average superhero epics, preposterous wooden clunkers like “The Hulk” and “Daredevil.” This time, it’s actually entertaining. Perlman brings a welcome humor to Hellboy, which goes a long way since the movie gets bogged down by conventional supernatural skirmishes. The movie is slightly overlong; there are stretches when Del Toro lets the action drag. “Hellboy” for all it’s outsize fun, is never a great comic book entertainment; there’s none of the weight of, say, an “X-Men” film. But it’s cool enough to keep the movie from descending into hell.
