A near miss for Big Red.

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2004)

Having anxiously awaited this movie from the first stirrings of rumors of its creation many years ago, and as a fan of the comics since the first issue, I found Guillermo del Toro's take on Mike Mignola's Hellboy to be somewhat of a letdown. I have been a fan of del Toro's as well; his aesthetic sensibilities have elevated films like Mimic and Blade II, and The Devil's Backbone is one if the best ghost stories on film to date.
Hellboy, however, is rife with problems that detract from what promised to be a classic adventure ride. Some terrible sound mixing choices all but obscure many of Hellboy's quips and verbal jabs, mostly in the fight scenes but even during lighter moments. With a stogie in his mouth for much of the film, Hellboy may someday grace the cover of Cigar Aficionado but won't win any awards for delivering lines that can be clearly heard.
His sparring partners for most of the movie, the regenerating Sammaels, are poorly designed, making it hard to tell one end from the other and generally adding a confused look to the chaotic battles. In Mignola's comics the nemeses are so well crafted as to be instantly recognizable, whether Frog Men or Frankenstein Apes, and I had hoped that some of these creatures would make it into this adaptation. Instead, del Toro opted for the Predator-throwback Sammael, who is used and reused in three different fights, none more entertaining than the others. The penultimate villain, too, is just a towering mass of amorphous tentacles that evokes little menace and much confusion. Its very appearance seems tacked on, and, with no anticipation set up beforehand, makes little impact.
Which is a shame, because the characters themselves are all well-crafted. Hellboy is rounded out even more in the film than in the comics thanks to his yearning for the vulnerable pyrokinetic Liz Sherman. Amphibious Abe Sapien is a joy to watch in action and is missed in the second half. The villains, too, are intriguing; Rasputin's occult menace, Ilsa's power-mad love and devotion to him, and Kroenen's deadly and macabre, clockwork fighting machine antics are great counterparts to the heroes.
The problem, really, is del Toro's script, which seems to go from scene to scene without the benefit of having them tied together very well. Those elements lifted from the comics are grafted on to del Toro's new material, but there seems to be a bridge or two missing and the final result is a patchwork of things that work and things that definitely do not.
Had the story been slightly smaller in scope it may have fared better in the end. But tackling the origins of Hellboy and his ultimate choice in bringing about the Apocalypse may have been too much ground to cover in one film. What could have been a globe-trotting Monster Mash version of Raiders of the Lost Ark ends up as a messy collage of characters and action scenes that add up to less than the sum of its parts. I'm sure it will do well enough to warrant a sequel, and hopefully with all of the exposition taken care of del Toro and Mignola can come up with a story more worthy of the characters' efforts.