Call it the Pan’s Labyrinth effect. Brimming with confidence and new ideas, writer/director Guillermo del Toro has made Hellboy II a different kind of film compared to its predecessor — itself a satisfying development. The first film was necessarily an origin story, which can be detrimental to a superhero movie, but director Guillermo del Toro and leading man Ron Perlman, just visible glaring out from inside his demon-red character makeup, tackled it with smarts and heart, emphasizing the conflict between Hellboy’s ostensible destiny — he’s meant to be the catalyzing agent for Armageddon — and the new home he’s made among humans who need his protection. The new movie moves Hellboy’s inner friction forward in logical, intriguing ways, forwarding a notion that must eventually occur to every great, sensitive curmudgeon: what if the human race isn’t worth saving?
Hellboy
Hellboy, a movie I caught up with only
under threat of sequel, turns out to play exactly toward
director Guillermo del Toro’s strengths — it’s a sprawling fantasy story brimming with
dark whimsy, and realized through an intense visual imagination. Ron
Perlman is Hellboy, as far as I can tell a kind of domesticated demon
who was brought into our world during World War II by some especially
evil immortal Nazis seeking to catalyze the end of the world. But a
funny thing happened on the way to the Apocalypse, and Hellboy ends
up as part of a secret supernatural task force (based, hilariously, in Newark), having been aised by a British egghead who taught him to fight against
the powers of darkness instead of leading them to victory. It’s your
classic nature-versus-nurture situation, and it’s given Hellboy a bit
of an identity crisis - he keeps his frightening red horns filed
down to stony nubs, a personal-grooming metaphor of the type that
flows naturally out of the character’s comic-book origins. Ostensibly
it’s a way to make his imposing figure less terrifying, but you
quickly get the feeling that it is really a way for him to keep reminding
himself that he’s one of the good guys.