Hellboy Heats Up the Superhero
By Richard Corliss
The clamor of moviegoers to be the first to see the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight -- theaters that scheduled midnight shows next Thursday have added others at 3 and 6 a.m. -- proves that superheroes are plenty hot these days. But one of our favorites is downright infernal. That would be Hellboy. A demon summoned to Earth by Nazi scientists in 1944, he has grown into a strapping crime fighter, red of skin and with his horns sheared off because, well, they got in the way. As a member of the U.S. government's Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Hellboy is sworn to eradicate creatures odder and way nastier than he is.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a sequel to the 2004 film version of Mike Mignola's Dark Horse Comics franchise, pits Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and his colleagues, Aquaman Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and the literally incendiary Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), against netherworld twins determined to take over the earth. If the film is just as strange and endearing as its glowing protagonist -- and it is -- that's because the director and co-writer (with Mignola) is Guillermo del Toro, 43, who has the wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies.
Del Toro has a peripatetic resume. He began in his native Mexico with the suave horror movie Cronos, made his U.S. debut with the scary Mimic, went to Spain to direct two acclaimed ghost stories about lost children, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, and proved his Hollywood bona fides with the genre films Blade II and the first Hellboy.
Other directors of big-budget action films built their early reps with smaller works abroad -- Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) in Germany, Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) in France -- but no foreigner has graduated to the big time with such a quirky cinematic personality as Del Toro's. He has seamlessly blended art house and grind house, and kept his soul in the process.
All his films, whether based on U.S. comic books or his own verdant visions, are uniquely and vibrantly Del Toro. From Cronos through Hellboy II, there's a consistency of visual tropes: the insects, crucifixes, subways and bizarre clockwork devices, not to mention his ethereal or infernal or disgusting creatures -- the good, the bad and the ugh-y.
Mignola's notion of preternaturally gifted freaks assembled to fight a malevolent underworld of monsters plays to many of Del Toro's strengths. "Tooth fairy" insects swarm over the good guys, and a stroll through a Troll Market is populated with more intergalactic oddities than the Star Wars cantina scene. (One small, cute creature attached to an ogre's chest snaps, "I'm not a baby. I'm a tumor.") The movie's tone is often facetious, which keeps it from reaching the melancholy heights of Pan's Labyrinth. But its humor mixes with pathos, as when Hellboy and Abe, mooning over lost loves, duet on the '70s kitsch classic "Can't Smile Without You."
At the end we're left with the promise not only of a Hellboy III but of a Hellboy Jr., possibly a Hellboy Jr. Miss. That project may have to wait, however. Peter Jackson, the New Zealand horror maven who conquered Hollywood with The Lord of the Rings, has tapped Del Toro to direct a two-film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The fit seems ideal for an artist who's ever ready to create, or inhabit, a new fantasy landscape.