FAITHFUL BUT UNINVOLVING

Rating: Null/10 (27 March 2004)

Ever since I was a tiny, wee kid I have loved me some monsters. The way other kids immersed themselves in baseball statistics or worship of the Bay City Rollers I spent innumerable hours poring over mythology, folklore, horror comics and monster movies; anything, so long as it contained my beloved monsters (well, maybe not Frankenberry, Count Chocula and the now-forgotten Fruit Brute). In fact, my earliest memory of a movie is that infamous celluloid horse turd The Giant Gila Monster, and shortly after that during my fifth year I got hooked on the West coast's version of Creature Features, hosted by that friend and mentor to all of us monster kids, the late Bob Wilkins. In that magical year I was exposed to Son of Godzilla, The Killer Shrews and The Navy Versus the Night Monsters, not great cinema perhaps, but they all delivered the goods to my eagerly waiting mind. Bottom line: if a movie can hand me a healthy dose of improbable critters on the loose, I'm there. So off I went to see an advance screening of the movie adaptation of Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics, secure in the knowledge that the screen would soon be flush with fantastic beasties both opposing and defending us weak, soft humans.
The rather faithful film version begins in Scotland, 1944 as those pesky Nazis and a seemingly unkillable Russian sorcerer attempt to open a portal into our dimension, through which they hope to summon Lovecraftian elder gods who will destroy the world and lead to some sort of new Eden with the bad guys in control. A group of Allied soldiers and a British expert on the paranormal thwart the summoning, but soon come to realize that something made it through the doorway before it closed. That something is a cute little red demon that is quickly named Hellboy and raised to fight on the side of the angels.
Hellboy grows up to be one seriously ass-kicking BMF (played well by Ron Perlman of TV's Beauty and the Beast), surrounded by fellow paranormal heroes in the employ of the secret Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, so when the unkillable sorcerer and his seig heiling cronies show up again in the present day the Earth has champions who are at the ready, highly trained, armed to the teeth with both technology and superhuman powers, and a fearlessness that enters into territory best described as suicidal. Throw in major throwdowns with tenacious man eating demons, a crazed clockwork cyborg, an irascible talking corpse, a jealousy-fueled romantic subplot and an impending apocalypse frought with Cthulhuoid wigglies and you have a recipe for a monster fan's Nirvana at the cinema, no?
No.
HELLBOY brings a lot to the plate and if taken as simply a cornucopia of monsters and neat stuff to look at it succeeds in spades; in fact there are a lot of good character bits to found here as well. However, the sum total is yet another overlong origin movie that has a certain sense of detachment from both its audience and its own material. For the most part the film comes to a dead halt when monsters aren't kicking each other's asses in an orgy of special effects and that's a real stumbling block for the first installment of a potential franchise. I'm predicting a strong opening weekend, but much like THE HULK word of mouth could prove to be lethal. But then again, special effects have become such a crowd pleaser over the years that some films have been able to rake in megabucks despite having nothing else to offer the filmgoer, with the current run of misbegotten Star Wars movies as a tragic case in point.
On the plus side, we get to see what an insecure guy Hellboy is when not out kicking ass as evidenced by his contentious relationship with his adoptive father (John Hurt) and his concerns about whether the sultry pyrokinetic whom he deeply loves (Selma Blair) is falling for the new kid from the FBI (Rupert Evans). And resident psychic gill man Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, voiced by Frasier's David Hyde Pierce) is a joy to behold in all of his amphibian glory, all huge black eyes and sweet, erudite voice. But hey, give me a gill man and you have a very happy viewer.
So my bottom line on HELLBOY is that while not bad it's not as involving as it could have been. It's worth seeing on the big screen for the abundant eye candy, but that's about it. And at two hours and twelve minutes in length it's a bit of a long haul without a few bong hits in you.