Exciting Villains, Boring Hero

Rating: 3/10 (7 November 2006)

HELLBOY is one of those frustrating movies where you can spot about 100 exciting ideas that they didn't follow up on -- but all you get is a muddled up mess instead.
The movie's prologue is explosive -- desperate Nazis summoning up hell itself to ward off total defeat in 1945. Right away you are introduced to eye-catching villains and chilling possibilities. There's Rasputin, the sex-mad Russian mystic, and Ilsa, a stunning blonde SS She Wolf. He's about to gamble his soul to break into the vortex of evil. She's his willing slave and they kiss good-bye in a way that scorches the screen. Your mind buzzes with questions. How did Rasputin survive all these years? Why is he working for the Nazis? What is Ilsa like in bed? How did Rasputin tame her? Right away, you get it all -- sex, sadism, Satan, excitement, evil, and sensuality.
Unfortunately . . . these are not the main characters of the film. The main character is Hellboy. Unlike Karel Roden (as Rasputin) and Biddy Hodson (as Ilsa) Ron Perlman as Hellboy just doesn't have the sexual charisma to draw you in. He's a big lug, that's all. A big lug painted red, smoking a cigar. The moment the prologue ends, and we switch focus to his personal problems, the movie begins to drag, slowly, to a halt.
Certainly it's possible to make audiences care deeply about a big, dumb lug. Like Rocky Balboa. But Rocky was an underdog, someone we liked because, big as he was, he got no respect and was picked on by the whole neighborhood. But Hellboy is the opposite. He sulks and mopes, but he's given every possible luxury and his government bosses treat him with kid gloves. And in the fight scenes, which drag on and on, he's invincible, and his enemies are generic and ugly. There's a fight scene with a giant squid thing that drags on for ten minutes, literally. Why do you care who wins when a red painted lug stands around punching a bunch of rubber and foam for ten minutes? What this movie needed was to follow up on much more of the background ideas -- more mysticism, Nazi sex, occult mysteries, and historical scandals. The scenes they hinted at in the back story were far more exciting than anything the Hellboy actually does.