Man, what a mess they made of Hellboy.
I went to see this movie despite my better instincts. The commercials I’d seen weren’t the least bit appealing. The same, alas, can be said for the movie itself. The grandeur, charm, and eeriness of the comic were nowhere to be found. In its place were a bunch of action sequences that weren’t particularly thrilling, a bunch of slimy monsters that weren’t particularly scary, a bunch of events that weren’t particularly connected, and a bunch of characters that weren’t particularly interesting.
Hellboy himself was played with all the aplomb you’d expect from Ron Perlman, but he was written painfully generically–just the umpteenth brash, wisecracking anti-hero down the pike, with none of the quiet deadpan resignation that makes him such an interesting character in the funnybooks. They took Abe Sapien down a new road, endowing him with extensive psychic powers I don’t remember him having in the comics and giving him the effete accent and demeanor of David Hyde Pierce, but the poor guy disappears halfway through the film and plays no role in the climax (which is probably just as well, seeing as how he was pretty much useless the rest of the time except as a convenient way to insert flashbacks into the flick). There’s a fundamentally pointless everyman character, who besides being boring throws off the balance of the film, which should have been centered solely on Hellboy. There’s Professor Broom (Bruttenholm, though you only see that name in the end credits), who’s dying, but the film completely negates the significance of that revelation by–well, let’s just say cancer’s the least of his worries. Liz Sherman was probably my favorite character; as played by Selma Blair she was believably aching. But even she is weighed down by the needlessly tortuous plot in which characters do this or that thing (start off in semi-retirement, say, then come back due to an event that probably killed hundreds of people but which fact goes unremarked upon; or start off in trouble, then continue to do the thing that got them in trouble, but not get in any more trouble) with no rhyme, reason, meaning, or consequence.
That’s the real problem with the film: Nothing has any weight. Why do we start with Hellboy on the outs with his “father,” Professor Broom, but never show a real reconciliation between them, nor comment on their failure to reach one? Why do we start with Liz Sherman institutionalized when she seems to be just fine, then suddenly bring her back into the fold when she’s a disaster waiting to happen? Why do the bad guys unleash the slimy Samael monsters? Why make destroying them such a central part of the plot if they do nothing to further the story, and if we’re just going to have a character toss in a throwaway line explaining that, after all the main characters have had their asses kicked by them, “we’ve destroyed thousands of their eggs” anyway? And if that’s true, how the hell do so many of them wind up in Moscow? And are slimy tentacled monsters really the *only* monsters worth showing? Seriously, variety is the spice of life, people, especially when you’ve got the entire Mike Mignola bestiary from which to select the damn things! And how is it that getting shot full of holes doesn’t kill the zombie Nazi guy at one point, but getting stabbed full of holes does? And what’s the point of the immortal she-Nazi, anyway? Does she do *anything*? And what’s up with Rasputin? He can apparently materialize anywhere at will and just as easily disappear, so why does he bring himself into contact with his enemies so often in order to use them to further his plans, when he could clearly accomplish quite a bit on his own? And why use Hellboy at all when you contain an apocalypse-causing god within your own body?
Folks, I could sit here writing more of these unanswered questions about dopey plot points all afternoon. That’s what a mess this movie is. And it’s not fun enough or good-looking enough to make up for it, nor are the characters compelling enough or the ideas unique enough. It’s a big, big let-down, even more so when you consider what a genuine marvel the comics themselves are. Do yourself a favor: Take your money and spend them on those comics instead.