Hellboy fun to look at, but not a lot else

Rating: Null/10 (8 April 2004)

Guillermo del Toro has made good films before. He helmed Blade II, an exhilarating, gothic, action-packed sequel to the surprisingly stylish original, and showed that he had a flare for directing `comic book' movies. Some of this flare can be seen in certain frames of Hellboy, where we get the feeling that we could freeze any particular frame and insert it directly into one of the original comics and it would blend right in with the rest of the images. Unfortunately, this visual aspect is really the only noteworthy aspect of Hellboy.
Based on a comic, the movie follows the fairly cheesy activities of Hellboy, a demon brought into the world through a portal constructed by Rasputin and the Nazis to wreak havoc on the Earth, who was taken and raised for good by the Department for Paranormal Research and Defense after the Nazi's plan was foiled by US troops. Right..
Anyway, surprisingly this kind of ridiculous camp quality is not necessarily where the movie has its downfall. There's a lot of fun to be had if del Toro could just find a happy medium between Men in Black type intentional cheesiness, and some of the style he harnessed with Blade II. True, the movie recognizes its own goofiness and tries to use that to its full effect, making us roll our eyes and laugh quite often, but there's no control behind it. Del Toro seems to have just told everybody to go hog-wild on the cheesy fun and forgotten that he was making a movie in the process.
The result is that after about a half-hour we get tired of the intentionally lame one-liners, the over-the-top monsters, and the annoying, scholarly fish-man (aptly named Abraham Sapien), and our concentration drifts to all the things to not like in the film.
Allow me to illustrate. Selma Blair plays Hellboy's troubled love interest, a girl who is able to start fires with her mind, but is unable to control exactly when this happens. Luckily, Hellboy happens to be immune to fire.
But then Hellboy really seems to be a movie full of immunities. Like when a monster he fights repeatedly (to the point where we are begging to see something different) begins laying eggs in the sewers and spawning more of itself at random for no real apparent reason other than to provide us with another sewer scene reminiscent of Blade II, without any of the tension, visual ferocity, or stylization. Apparently Hellboy is also immune to gaping plot holes.
Then there's when the Nazis come back onto the scene with a resurrected Rasputin in tow and attempt to pass themselves off as characters in the final acts, desperately trying to rush out some sort of a plotting conflict involving Hellboy opening up a portal to the netherworld.by this point I was crying. However, it's when a portal opens up, seemingly from the moon, and a giant squid-like creature comes down to Earth (maybe to save us from the rest of this movie?) that we finally see Hellboy's true fighting capabilities as he straps explosives onto his body, allows the uber-squid to eat him, and detonates the explosives from inside the squid's stomach, propelling him unscathed amid a scatter-storm of tentacles and special effects. So among other things, Hellboy must also be immune to monsters' digestive systems, earth-shattering explosions, and the schemes of one-dimensional villains.
Now I'm ripping on this movie pretty hard, maybe harder than it deserves. After all, the preposterousness is the point, and there are plenty of entertaining moments throughout (like Hellboy's love for baby kittens, or his rooftop conversation with a 12 year old about love), but the absurdity is taken too far at times, resulting in a movie where the battles are so over-the-top that they all feel the same, where the hero can't be hurt in any way, shape, or form, and where we've had most of the fun we're going to have within the first 30 minutes.
After this it's all just too much and there are more scenes and lines that elicit eye-roles than those that get laughs. I had a stupid grin on my face for a lot of Hellboy, and it is very much a comic book on screen. Now del Toro just needs to refine things a little bit and ration the cheesy humor. And I wouldn't be surprised, with the way Hollywood is today, if in the near future we find out that the one thing Hellboy isn't immune to is a sequel.
**(out of ****)