Kelly Wand"Hellboy: The Golden Army" review
August 7th 2008 01:02
"Damned steampunk fairies..."
Is it dumb to say that a movie based on a comic-book felt too juvenile, too kid-friendly? I don’t remember much about the original “Hellboy” except that it felt grimmer, smarter, and more assured; the more I read about the liberties taken from the comic books (there’s nothing between Hellboy and Liz, the suited agents aren’t such faceless Redshirts, and Abe isn’t quite so C-3PO), the less I like this movie. “The Dark Knight” proved you don’t need to reduce edgy material to pap to find an audience. Do people really like pap, or do studios just think they do?
Since Ron Perlman’s face and Selma Blair are talented actors, I’m inclined to think the problem is the script, which wanders all over the place and never, ever finds the right tone; the jokes are embarrassing clunkers and the action scenes lack vitality and a great action director’s sense of space and whirligig timing. Though the visuals are occasionally trippy, they’re also strangely passionless and one-note (when Del Toro wants to awe you, he puts eyeballs everywhere) and the drama seems deliberately scaled back in favor of cutesiness; even when tragic stuff’s going down, the characters never really seem engaged – like in “Indy 4,” you get the sense the actors are thinking about their laundry during the shot and soon you are too.
Some sequences are so retarded they make you flinch. Why are they trying to shoot zillions of flying polliwog-sized monstrosities in the dark with tiny pistols for ten minutes if Liz can just fry them? Hellboy sees a forest elemental grow to skyscraper size and it slowly, bloodlessly wreaks havoc in the middle of the city, and he says he’s going to load a gun, and he loads it, and…doesn’t fire it for five goddamn minutes, while the thing wriggles threateningly like a Scooby Doo hologram and the elfin prince who sicced it on him (and has been set up as crazily agile) perches on a nearby roof and urges him not to kill it. Why doesn’t he just kill Hellboy right then himself? And why does he leave right after?
Ancient secrets are just handed over on a platter. Hellboy’s crew can’t find a troll market, they’ve looked everywhere; oh no, wait, there it is, we just needed to find this old lady who eats kittens to open the door, oh wait, we didn’t need her either. They go to Ireland, find a giant buried statue in the hill, and right then along comes a centaur-like wagon guy who welcomes them to Eire. There’s some derivative “X-Men” misfit angst that comes out of nowhere: Hellboy’s exposed to the public and becomes a media darling; but the next time he’s out on the street, a guy calls him ugly and the police later try to shoot him like they have no idea who he is (and he’s just shot a giant rampaging monster in the head in front of them). Hellboy haltingly reads the title of a Manilow song on Abe’s CD like he’s never heard of it before and seconds later he appears to know every lyric by heart. In the last battle, Liz and Abe just stand around “reacting” unmolested by the golden army while Hellboy jumps around and fights, even though Nuada’s just instructed the army to kill them all. The “friction” between Hellboy and Liz is EXCLUSIVELY that she’s pregnant (which she takes a hundred tests to confirm – why did she buy so many beforehand? -- although later she somehow instinctively knows she’s carrying twins). There are long stretches of offscreen downtime in which she could conceivably tell Hellboy this, but she continues choosing to raise the subject in the middle of missions and battles, just so the disclosure can be put off till the end of the movie. What for, since we’re told of her condition five minutes into the movie? Is the suspense supposed to be Hellboy’s reaction? He’s predictably thrilled. So what was the problem then?
Though we’re meant to find Hellboy’s taste for candy and cigars incongruously relatable, the only characters who stand out are Luke Goss’ Prince Nuada (he finds human civilization appropriately obnoxious) and James Dodd’s not-quite-funny-except-in-the -locker-scene Johann Krauss (his last line is shockingly Mel Brooks-y). It’s sort of ironic that after “Dark Knight” spun a gloomy tragic tale in which humanity ultimately comes off as worth saving, in this featherweight CG cartoon they’re back to being the usual dicks and incompetents we know from every other superhero movie, and the heroes are constantly selling them out for personal reasons (although I sort of wondered at the end why Abe quit too).
There are some decent bits. The demonic creature that cures Hellboy seems to be playing shuffleboard by himself in the same cavern as the golden army, which is sort of quietly funny, as is the Government sending a by-the-book company to monitor Hellboy who turns out to be a smoke-filled diving-bell suit from the 19th century. And overall the movie’s worst moments are light-years better than the best in any of the “Mummy”s (not that I saw the last two). Yet much as I admired “Pan’s Labyrinth,” I left “Hellboy 2” with new misgivings about Guillermo del Toro tackling “The Hobbit.” Hollywood studios turn a lot of great foreign directors into bland self-parodies, à la John Woo, and you get the sense this movie is just what a Hollywood version of “Labyrinth” would have resembled (or, in Hollywood’s defense, maybe Del Toro’s creatures are intriguing and exotic only when they speak Spanish). Despite its golden warriors, “Hellboy 2” lacks a Midas touch.
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