Heckboy

Rating: 4/10 (2 August 2004)

There are guys with faces just made for Hollywood. I speak not of the Tom Cruises, Paul Newmans, and Cary Grants. I'm talking about the Marty Feldmans, Michael Berrymans, Edna May Olivers, and Rondo Hattons. People so goofy looking, they could only get a job in the movies. Actors like this are handy because they require almost no makeup. Their face is its own special effect. So you gotta wonder why the filmmakers of Hellboy would cast Ron Perlman - a pretty damn beastly looking guy on his own - for the title role, then bury him under a ton of makeup and red paint. They could have got just any large actor and it wouldn't have made for any extra trouble. Not putting anything against Ron Perlman, who's a fine enough actor, but he's not exactly the first guy that comes to mind when you think 'starring role'. Come to think of it, they did the same thing with Perlman in that TV show he had way back when.
Anyway, Ron plays the adult Hellboy, a sort of orphaned demon who gets adopted as a toddler by a British paranormal officer during WWII. As already stated, he's all red, plus he has a huge left forearm that looks like one of those things attack-dog trainers wear, and has two humongous horns that protrude from his forehead. He keeps these filed down because he wants to fit in better with humans. Red humans with tails and elephantiasis of the left arm, apparently. Personally, I think he keeps them filed down because they look like cool aviator goggles pulled up above his eyes.
Together, Hellboy and his aging British foster parent (John Hurt) fight crime along with a Fishman that apparently was also adopted along the way. Fishman looks a little like a cross between the aliens in Close Encounters and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He lives in a giant fish tank, but can survive outside with a special collar. Fishman is more of an intellectual non-violent sort and provides all the case research and background info for Hellboy to gruffly dismiss as he breaks out the hardware. Into the fold comes a regular 20-something human who is recruited as a partner/servant for Hellboy, as well as the future head of the paranormal crimefighting division once John Hurt kicks the bucket, which looks to be any day now. Hellboy and Fishman have codenames in this underground organization: "Red" and "Blue". You can probably guess which one is which. These are needed because you're pushing the envelope of the PG-13 rating if you're saying 'Hell'Boy all the time.
Hellboy is supposedly based on a comicbook, though to be perfectly candid, I've never heard of it. Then again, I haven't heard of half of the comicbooks they make movies from nowadays, including the X-Men. Yes, I live in a cave, and the last time I cracked a comicbook, Shazam was the hot new thing. Is that guy still around? I suppose not, since there isn't a movie about him out there. Hellboy the movie seems to draw from lots of other comicbook movies, though. There's the strained father-son relationship that Hulk apparently didn't cover sufficiently. There's the whole superheroes-are-persecuted-because-they're-different angle that X-Men always tries to sell. Speaking of X-Men, there's also a character here (that I call FireGirl) who causes things to catch fire. In the first half of the film, she can do this at will, but in the second half, she needs to be slapped in the face first. I'm not sure what that's all about. She always appears to be upset, supposedly because she doesn't like being called "FireStarter" by the kids in her school, especially when Drew Barrymore beat her to it.
Hellboy's first assignment is to take care of the Keymaster of Gozer, who has grown some reptilian dreads and a second pair of eyeballs since his Ghostbuster days. This encounter leads to a big fight in a subway station. Director Guillermo Del Toro sure does like those subway stations. The most notable thing about this fight scene is that right smack in the middle of it, a woman asks Hellboy to save her kittens, which have been left in a wooden box on the floor of the subway station. My first thought at this point was, "What would anyone be doing on a subway with a box of kittens?" But, I've never been on a subway, so I can't really judge. However, I have seen people bring stranger things on an airplane - or at least I did before the FAA decided that things like toenail clippers, laser pointers, and bookmarks were deemed as the tools of hijackers. I bring this scene up, because I think this movie is kind of poking fun at comicbook movies in general, where, as this scene references, someone always has a baby they left in a burning building that needs rescuing. There are other examples in the movie of this tongue-in-cheek approach. The vehicle our crimefighting heroes arrive in is a garbage truck, Hellboy's favorite meal is a monster stack of pancakes, and in one scene he confesses his crush for FireGirl from afar on a rooftop to a 10 year old boy as they share milk and cookies. It's just that kind of film.
Eventually, Hellboy will fight more keymasters, some Nazis, a zombie/robot that wields swords like they were nightsticks, and some giant space squids. To be honest, I got a little lost by that point.
Hellboy is an OK movie if you're into this sort of thing, I guess. I'm not, however, and found the film to be about a half-hour too long. The attempts at humor could've been a nice foil for the typical comicbook-movie shenanigans, but they were never really all that funny, though I'll give it marks for trying.