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Ron Perlman fights the darkness in curio del Toro comic book flick Hellboy |
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman),
Rupert Evans (John Thaddeus), John Hurt (Dr Trevor Bruttenholm), Karel Roden
(Rasputin), Jeffrey Tambor (Tom Manning), Doug Jones (Abe Sapien), Brian Steele
(Sammael), Ladislav Beran (Karl Ruprecht Kroenen), Bridget Hodson (Ilsa
Haupstein), Corey Johnson (Agent Clay)
As little as 10 years ago, outside a few core characters
like Batman, the X-Men or Spiderman, comic book movies were an odd curio hard
to place in the mass market. Today of course, you can virtually get any
character who has appeared in a cartoon strip up on the screen with a budget of
millions. But back in 2004, Guillermo del Toro had to squeeze this project out
on a smaller budget in order to get the studio to agree to make the film.
Hellboy has a
particularly demented story. In 1945, the Nazis, working in partnership with
Rasputin (Karel Roden) – yes that
Rasputin, don’t even ask – attempt to open a portal to hell to, well I’m not
quite sure what they want to do, but it probably involves the destruction of
the world. Anyway, some humble GIs stop them and the only thing that comes
through the portal is a little demon with an enormous stone fist. Raised by
paranormal expert Dr Trevor Bruttenholm (John Hurt), this creature grows up
into cigar-chomping secret-agent-for-the-FBI Hellboy (Ron Perlman), working on
paranormal investigations. But when Rasputin returns from the dead it looks
like all hell (literally) is about to break out.
Okay it should be pretty clear to you from that that Hellboy is an odd film. It’s very much
from del Toro’s B-movie heart, and he invests this nonsense material with a
great deal of directorial style and heart – a real “geek-boy-artist” job. Del
Toro has a great deal of imagination and is able to strike a happy balance
between enjoying the material and not taking it all too seriously. So he lets
the film barrel along, throwing plenty of nonsense at the screen without worrying
about trying to make it make real-world sense. In fact Del Toro is clearly so
fond of the material that he basically shoots the whole thing like a comic book
come to life.
So the film is crammed with bright primary colours mixed
with murky blacks, and Del Toro frames many key moments like comic book panels.
It’s a film packed with striking images and scenes built around stuff that
feels like it should teeter over into ridiculous camp all the time but never
quite does. Its steam-punky styling instead manages to feel somehow both
strikingly original visually and also strangely packed with integrity – like
Del Toro made a very personal big-budget movie for his childhood, the sort of
bizarro cult film that’s actually-quite-good and it’s going to win a huge
following once people can find it for themselves (which is indeed what
happened).
Del Toro’s other great principled stand was to ensure that
Ron Perlman played the lead. Hellboy is a bizarre character – over six feet,
red, horns, a tail – but what Perlman and Del Toro do so well is to make him
some sort of Brooklynish chippy blue-collar worker with a kitchen-sink earthy
wit. Perlman is clearly having a whale of a time playing this temperamental
demon like some sort of longshoreman Han Solo, a brattish teenager and rebel
with a world-weary cynicism. He’s crammed with contradictions (the demon who
fights for good!) that Del Toro is keen to explore – and makes consistently
interesting.
Because he’s such a different character, he energises a fairly
traditional story and his character’s pretty standard personal-struggle-plotline
(will he do the right or the wrong thing?). Perlman juggles all this really
well, and gives a performance that is both dry and funny but also has moments
of real heart and emotion. He even manages to sell his rather possessive love
for Selma Blair’s (also pretty good) fellow orphan with pyrotechnical abilities
as something heartfelt and caring, despite the fact that at one point he
basically stalks her. It’s a rather wonderful performance.
The rest of the cast are a bit more of a mixed bag. Rupert
Evans is saddled with the audience surrogate role – asking the questions we
can’t ask – while Karel Roden’s lipsmacking performance as Rasputin never quite
engages as a villain. Stronger roles come from Jeffrey Tambor as an officious
FBI director and especially from John Hurt as Hellboy’s father-figure, the kind
of quintessential ageing mentor that you can imagine his wards adoring.
The rather silly plot doesn’t really matter. The importance here
is the gothic chill of Del Toro’s style, mixed with his crazy
“larger-than-life” dark comic book tone. And it works really well: the film is
fun and witty, and if the storyline never really feels like it earns the “end
of the world” threat (and builds towards an uninvolving duking out with a giant
CGI monster), there are enough enjoyments along the way to make you want to
make the journey.
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