A misfit to the rescue
Mark Steyn
Hellboy 12A, selected cinemas
The time: 1944. The place: a small island somewhere near Scotland. In a desperate effort to win the war. the Nazis and their special adviser Grigori Rasputin — yes, that Rasputin, the well-known monk and Romanov confidante — have opened up a portal to the dark side in order to contact the Seven Gods of Chaos. Hitler figures they'll be more reliable allies than the Italians. Unfortunately, a US commando unit and a British expert in the
paranormal interrupt the procedure halfway through, but not before a small devilish moppet has slipped through the portal. This spawn of evil, born of an unholy alliance between the Nazis and Satan, grows up to be George W. Bush, and thanks to his father's Supreme Court judges ... whoops, sorry, that's the Michael Moore/John le Carre remake.
In this version, the cute little Satanic tyke gets christened (if that's the word) Hellboy by the American commandoes, taken back to the US by Professor Broom (John Hurt) and raised at the FBI's topsecret Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence in Newark, just across the river from Manhattan, Cut to the present day, where the prof, now pushing 90, uses his wartime adopted baby and a couple of other misfits as his crack agents fighting the dark forces that threaten the world. So Hellboy is basically your 24-hour plumber, on call for when something funny turns up in New York and he has to go down into the sewers and mop up.
The toddler is now a big hulking Hulktype, not green but red as paprika with a devilish tail, and one humungous right arm. But, as played with winning charm by Ron Perlman, he's basically an erubescent hardboiled Forties dick, He even wears a trenchcoat, chomps on his stogie and sighs gruffly, 'ANN, crap', while shrugging off yet another slimey tentacled monster in the subway tunnel. It's almost like the Hellboy's playing a role. Throw in the samurai topknot and muttonchop whiskers and you get the feeling he's a guy who's trying to fit in but whose only clues to local behaviour have been picked up from watching three different TV shows. There's one marvellous scene late in the picture involving Hellboy, his cigar, and a by-the-book FBI time-server that brings home the core of the character in the most adroit and unobtrusive way of any creature
feature in years. Hellboy is a freak conceived for evil but trying to rise above his nature, so the human touches are important to him. That's why he shears off his two Satanic horns, and trims the stumps every morning.
Guillermo del Toro's movie is based on Mike Mignola's comic book, which I've never read. My kids like to go to a comic store in Montreal and, while they're picking up Scooby-Doo and the like, I browse the 'graphic novels' trying to find something that will tickle my fancy. When popular culture gets more arty, it often gets more self-referential: that's what happened in musicals and westerns, and my sense is that it's happened in comic books, too. The folks who created Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Captain America just got on with it. Sixty years later, it all seems to have a hard time crawling out under the weight of everything that's gone before. On the page, you can get away with it. But once you put it up on the big screen it can easily seem tired and formulaic. In theory, that's what should have happened to Hellboy. [mean, honestly: Nazis, again; and does the crazy baddy really have to be Rasputin? Accompanied by some ageless blonde stormtrooper dominatrix with the hots for him?
And yet del Toro pulls it off. Even though the prologue's out of Indiana Jones and the top-secret Bureau is Men In Black and the group of do-gooding freaks is a sideways X-Men, the director manages to give the clichés their own internal reality. He's helped by his star's lively performance. Despite having pretty much everything buried under make-up and effects, Perlman, forever landing awkwardly and uncricking his neck and shoulders, gives Hellboy a physical reality surpassing The Hulk or Daredevil or any of the biggername summer blockbusters. His love interest is a pyrokineticist played by Selma Blair, who for as long as I can remember seems to have been stuck in the role of the snooty fiancée who gets dumped for someone more fun and more blonde. Now at last she gets to light up the screen herself. Her combustible kiss with Hellboy is awfully romantic.
But the real credit belongs to del Toro. So many action movies play like storyboards — just four or five set-pieces with some crude connective material. Hellboy has a preposterous plot with derivative characters but tells its story with such a natural flow it's hard not to get drawn in. I like the way it understands that you can have energy in the stillest moments — like Hellboy and some nine-year-old kid he's bumped into on the roof of a building, just sitting yakking about stuff, as they watch a couple on a bench down below. My only reservation is that there's something not quite right about a film where metaphysical evil is just something to be clobbered into submission. They might want to rethink that for the sequel.
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