Creative and colourful comic book romp

Rating: 9/10 (26 July 2016)

Guillermo del Toro's follow-up to the successful BLADE II is another film in the same spirit: playful script, strong action and excellent set design. HELLBOY is another in the recent line of pretty decent comic book hero adaptations, and hey, what do you know, it's a pretty decent film. Perhaps not the masterpiece I had hoped it to be, but definitely as good as BLADE II and popular enough at the box office to warrant a sequel. After years of solid roles in support, Ron Perlman finally gets the lead role he so richly deserves, and he is brilliant as Hellboy, the wisecracking, bright red, half-human half-demon superhero who has a huge stone hand and files his horns away every morning. Perlman's make-up is excellent giving him that fine balance between dodgy realism and comic-book colourfulness and really, his character can't be faulted at all.
The plot is rather thin, linking together a series of impressive set-pieces. The opening sequence in Scotland, with a group of evil Nazis, is very well portrayed, as are the various battles with the PREDATOR-like tentacled dog monsters which are able to multiply themselves when killed – kind of like the hydra. There is some great action involving trains and a scene with a huge demolishing pendulum kind of like the one in THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. Throw in some nods to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and some surprisingly graphic moments of gore and violence (at least for a PG-13 certificate) and you have a film that action film fans will find impossible to dismiss. Just check out some of the genuinely nasty villains too: from the aforementioned dog beasts to the martial arts-fighting zombie, who has had his eyelids surgically removed and who is powered by some kind of weird clockwork contraption, shades of CRONOS there too.
Supporting cast is great, from the relatively unknown Rupert Evans who helps introduce us to the bizarre Hellboy, to Selma Blair – an actress I have never particularly liked before – as an incendiary fire starter. John Hurt is almost unrecognisable as the kindly old professor and Doug Jones is great as amphibian-man Abe Sapien. Del Toro throws in some fine artistic moments, such as the scenes in snowy Moscow where Rasputin is raised from the dead, and although the film has a kiddie-friendly rating, it feels really adult in terms of the very violent death scenes and blood spattering everywhere. Okay, so the ending unfortunately does get very predictable, and even the appearance of a Lovecraftian Cthulhu-style monster doesn't bode very well, as the CGI effects aren't THAT good. But it's not bad, and generally passes the time very well. Keep your eyes peeled for more Lovecraftian references in the movie, which are always fun for a book lover like me to spot.