Review: Hellboy

[major_clanger]

As a fan of Mike Mignola's Hellboy comic, it was more than a little frustrating to find that the UK release of the movie was trailing the US run by about five months. Of course, that's long enough for a DVD to come out - even a special 2-disc edition - so courtesy of the wonders of mail-order and region-free DVD players, bugshaw were able to watch it yesterday even though it isn't hitting the big screen for the best part of a month.

Given that Guillermo del Toro is a long-time fan of the comic, and that Mignola was heavily involved in production, the movie is not surprisingly faithful both to the original comic's content and its distinctive look. As on the page, scenes are often dark and starkly presented, with splashes of colour drawing the eye to the action (not hard when the central character is bright red). For the most part the film follows the comic's continuity very closely; the story is broadly an amalgam of Seed of Destruction and Right Hand of Doom but with elements from, or at least nods to, most of the (not that numerous) other Hellboy stories. There are a few changes: Hellboy's origin, as told in the pre-credits sequence, is slightly simplified, and Bruttenholm and Sherman are both made rather younger, so as to fit with shifting the events of TSoD from 1994 to 2004. Compressing a lot of story into two hours also loses some details, and the audience can be forgiven for wondering how Kroenen and Ilsa got from 1944 to 2004 apparently unchanged. (Comic fans will here chorus "Nazi cryonics, of course!") Oh, and I don't recall Manning being quite such a jerk in the comics. But by and large, the adaptation to film is astonishingly faithful.

[One more subtle, but in its way very significant, change, is in the context in which Hellboy and the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense operate. In the comics, both are known to the public and have been since the 1950s, with Hellboy being something of a reclusive celebrity. Evidently someone felt that the average cinema-going audience would have trouble with such a clearly alternate world, so in the film, the BPRD's existence is strenuously denied by the FBI whilst Hellboy is seen at large as a pop-culture myth like Bigfoot. This is a little unfortunate in that it pushes the film uncomfortably close to Men In Black territory, with Agent Myers' arrival at the BRPD being all too similar to Will Smith's first day at MiB HQ.]

And, being a faithful adaptation, we have all the stuff we know and love Hellboy for... Deranged Nazis! Bizzare tech! Cthulhoid tentacular monstrosities! Hellboy hitting things! Hellboy having the crap beaten out of him / having things fall on him / falling off things! Talking of the Big Red himself, Ron Perlman is a revelation; he captures Hellboy's combination of down-to-earth humour and inner angst perfectly.

I'm not sure how much of a success this will be in the cinema. It's perhaps a little too quirky to go down well as a generic action flick, whilst the central character has very little mainstream recognition. It's starting to be trailered very heavily, with our local Cineworld running four or five short teasers mixed in with other trailers, but I suspect that it might be on and off our screens quite quickly. In which case, catch it whilst you have the chance.

MC

Comments

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

No disagreement here. I saw the DVD a little while back - but have only read one hellboy story. Well worth watching if you like comics.

Until Sunday I would have said it was the best comic book adaptations I had seen on the big screen. However Spiderman 2 beats it.

My verdict - see both.