He'll always look this good

Rating: 8/10 (22 October 2008)

2004 was an interesting year for comic book movies: on quite opposing sides we had Spieder-Man 2, still the best superhero movie after Chris Nolan's vision of Batman, and Catwoman, a new low point for the genre seven years after Batman & Robin. There was also The Punisher, a fun but rather conventional flick which passed by rather unnoticed, and Hellboy, Guillermo del Toro's pet project, a film he'd been dying to make ever since he first read Mike Mignola's original comics. Now, this first crack at Dark Horse's antihero doesn't come off as a very personal piece of work (something Sam Raimi mastered to perfection with the second Spidey movie), but it's impressive nonetheless (plus, how often does one get the original author to contribute to the screenplay?).
Based largely on the classic story The Seed of Destruction, the film begins in 1944, when Nazi officer Kroenen and mad monk Rasputin try to summon the forces of Hell to defeat the Allies. The ritual goes awry, and out of Hell comes simply a scared little demon child. The little fella is adopted by Professor Broom (John Hurt), whose reassuring voice guides us through that introductory sequence.
Sixty years later, Broom is one of the fundamental elements of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), a covert organization that fights supernatural creatures. Or, as the Professor himself explains to the newly arrived Agent Myers (Rupert Evans): "There are things that bump in the night, Agent Myers. And we are those who bump back.". The bumping in question is provided by an elite team supervised by Broom: Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, with the voice provided by David Hyde Pierce, aka Niles Crane), an amphibian with some kind of telepathic/empathetic gift linked to his "hands"; Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a sweet-looking girl who has the ability to "be on fire"; and of course Hellboy (Ron Perlman), the now grown-up demon whose disregard for rules or subtlety is a constant pain in the ass for Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), the man in charge of keeping the BPRD hidden from the public. It won't prove that easy when a new disaster is about to happen, one that could have to do with Hellboy's oldest enemies.
The story is pretty basic, with the big exception of Hellboy being anything but your average "superhero": he's rude, smokes cigars, has a passion for kicking monster ass and greets most situations with the line "Oh, crap!". It's that uniqueness that got del Toro hooked in the first place, along with the imagery that accompanied such a character. As such, the film is extremely accomplished from a visual standpoint, although the director doesn't go all the way, probably because he is "stuck" with the duty of telling the classic origin story without taking things too far (it's easy to imagine studio executives saying: "Let's save that for the sequels, shall we?"), which means his traditional iconography, linked to ancient myths, is practically absent the whole time.
Compensation comes in terms of characterization: Perlman, who was the director's (and Mignola's) first and only choice for the title role (everyone else objected), delivers the goods with a bad-ass performance that sets the old red one apart from other "superheroes" while still giving him a rough charm that makes it easy to like him. Jones and Pierce's joined effort is also an admirable achievement, not to mention proof of del Toro's wisdom in having the main characters achieved through classic makeup, not CGI. Hurt and Tambor are the usual quality gu arantee in the limited time given to them, and Blair isn't that bad either (her screen-time is a bit mistreated, though). Evans, however, is a problem, his role lacking any real substance (how many times has the new-guy's-point-of-view gimmick been used?), but the aforementioned actors, plus a really terrifying villain (that would be Kroenen), manage to make is presence less irritating than it already is.
So, not exactly the triumph del Toro or fans hoped for, but a solid enough promise of greater things to come, just like Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man.