Hellboy 's heavyhanded mayhem could have used some comic relief
11:40 AM EST on Friday, April 2, 2004
BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Penny-a-liner
Columbia Pictures
Based on a pop comic-book series,
Hellboy
tells the story of a red devilish character (Ron Perlman) who comes to our in all respects from another dimension. Rupert Evans plays a FBI delegate.
There are a unbroken lot of monsters unleashed in Hellboy, a layer based on
a appear waggish-work series, whose intended audience seems to be all those
people who design they were too outdated in behalf of Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters
Unleashed.
Not that there aren't playful moments in Hellboy, despite a never-ending
parade of slimy, bull-like monsters who crunch the bones of their
victims. "I just killed Stinky," Hellboy claims after offing one of the
monsters. But in two hours of overloaded mayhem, Hellboy sure could have
used Shaggy and Scooby to lighten the load.
Writer-director Guillermo Del Toro of Blade II and the over-praised
Spanish art-house film The Devil's Backbone, based his script on Mike
Mignola's Dark Horse Comics series. It revolves around a red devilish
character who escapes to our world through a portal from another
dimension and is raised with love and kindness in a lab for paranormal
research in Newark, N.J.
Besides Hellboy himself, who is played by Ron Perlman — who was once
the Beast on the TV series Beauty and the Beast — there's Liz Sherman
(Selma Blair) whom he loves and who can create blue fire when she's
angry. There's also a Black Lagoonish-style merman creature called Abe
Sapien (Doug Jones) who lives in a big fish tank. Think X-Men, only less
benign, and you'll have some idea of what Hellboy is about.
Hellboy is brought out of some parallel dimension in 1944 on a Scottish
island by Rasputin (Karel Roden), the mad monk who undermined Russia's
Romanov dynasty in 1916, and who is now working for the Nazis. But
Hellboy, who is just a baby Hellboy at the time, is rescued by Professor
Broom (John Hurt). Broom raises him like a son . . . or at least as much
of a son as one can have with a red body, a tail and horns on his head.
Soon, however, Rasputin makes his return, hell-bent on using Hellboy to
destroy the world and enlists those bull-like, slithery creatures to do
a lot of the dirty work from their lair in a subway tunnel.
The setup for all this is complex, but interesting. Yet because those
bullish monsters keep replicating themselves, by the time Hellboy must
fight what seems like the 30th one, the movie gets a little stale.
There's an attempt to forge a sort of romance between Hellboy and Liz,
as well as romantic tension. For Liz also has eyes for a handsome FBI
agent who's on the case (Rupert Evans) and the jealous Hellboy thinks
all may be lost.
Most of the film's emotional heft comes near the end. But by then, one
has been overwhelmed by the rampaging special effects into numbness.
Though many of the effects are stunning, they grow mechanical because
for a long time there's no depth to the characters who are battling them.
**
Hellboy
Starring: Ron Perlman, John Hurt, Selma Blair, Rupert Evans, Jeffrey
Tambor, Karel Roden, Brian Steele, Doug Jones.
Rated: PG-13, contains violence.
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