"Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (Spoilers)
Jul. 14th, 2008 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snurriI should have loved this movie. I loved the first movie, I love the Hellboy and BPRD comics, and pretty much everything Guillermo del Toro does is amazing. None of those things are going to change in the wake of this film, and yet.
The word here is uneven. This is perfectly demonstrated in the opening moments, where we are shown an 11-year-old Hellboy which is SO BADLY DONE that my hopes were all but dashed already. Basically they painted some horrible kid actor red, gave him huge teeth, and then overdubbed his dialog with a voice actor breathing helium. The film recovered with the gorgeous animation of the story of the Golden Army and the war between the men and the elves, but every time they flashed back to the Quonset to show young Hellboy I was cringing. I'm glad we got to see John Hurt, but they could have done so much better. Kristin pointed out that the Howdy Doody stuff set up the puppet-y look of the folktale, which I hadn't thought about. So they thought it through, clearly, and then spent all their time making the animation gorgeous without making young Hellboy work.
Older Hellboy worked, for the most part, but it's hard to tell how much of this was built into the screenplay and how much is just Ron Perlman being born to play that role. There were elements of the Liz/Hellboy relationship which felt like a bad sitcom--the pregnancy secret, the lowest-common-denominator gender dynamics. By way of contrast, elements of the Abe/Hellboy relationship which felt sitcom-y as well, but for the most part they worked. The "Red"/"Blue" dynamic felt very comfortable and established and believable, and the beer 'n Barry scene may have been, on one level, cliched, but I was laughing my ass off. In some ways that scene illustrated something that worked in the first movie, which was that while Hellboy may be a huge scary impossible guy with a dark destiny who gets tossed around by scary monsters, but emotionally he's just a guy. He and Abe care about each other because they're both freaks, and they both know what it is to feel like any connections beyond that--particularly romantic ones--are impossible.
Given that they made that relationship feel real, the potential was there for the movie to at least equal its predecessor. There are genuine laughs and character moments and gorgeous things everywhere; they just don't flow together, or even connect in a way that's remotely satisfying. Clearly Del Toro's palette has more glitter on it than Mike Mignola's, and the noir aspect is missing from this film; and as others have said, there are times when the creatures feel like leftover concepts from "Pan's Labyrinth." That's not really the problem; when we're given the chance to look at them, they're still stunning. It's just that in sequences like the Troll Market scenes we are overloaded with things to look at, and the impact is somewhat lost.
The action doesn't suck, either, although even here there is frustration. In the climactic battle we see Johann and Hellboy (who, in the world of the comics, have never met--but I quibble) kick ass, but Liz and Abe just stand around with their guns and miraculously avoid being ground to bone pudding.* The blocking, in general, is a bit sloppy. It also weakens the otherwise Very Cool scene in which Prince Nuada takes on his father's guards; the action is cool, but the king's bodyguards make no effort to remove the king from danger or even to interpose themselves between him and the prince. The opening shoot-wildly-at-the-tiny-monsters scene is (ahem) scattershot at best. And there is one genuinely bad fight scene, when Hellboy faces the elemental--the effects are great, particularly the gorgeous aftermath, but the entire confrontation becomes "shoot the monster three times in the head." Yeah, I know Hellboy is holding a baby in his tail, but Chow Yun Fat did that decades ago. (Well, not the tail. You know what I mean.)
Perhaps the biggest problem is that the center of this movie isn't Hellboy, it's Nuada, and yet the movie doesn't engage sufficiently with the complexity of what he stands for and what he's trying to do. (As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nihilistic_kid points out, our heroes are on the wrong side of a genocide-in-progress.) In the first film Hellboy was the key--literally, and that's probably the only time this year you'll see that word used correctly--and his destiny was the central conflict of the film. Here Hellboy is kind of along for the ride, his only emotional connection being a story that his adoptive father read to him fifty years ago. So yeah, he's saving the world, but that's pretty much what we expect from our action and fantasy films these days. I'm not arguing for weepy soul-searching, because this is a ass-kicking movie and no mistake. (Combine the two and you get soul-kicking. Or ass . . . never mind.) But it could have been a smart one, and a careful one, and it's not.
*("Doesn't he know bones are crunchy?" Yes, I saw "Get Smart" recently, too. Sadly, it may have been better than this movie.)
The word here is uneven. This is perfectly demonstrated in the opening moments, where we are shown an 11-year-old Hellboy which is SO BADLY DONE that my hopes were all but dashed already. Basically they painted some horrible kid actor red, gave him huge teeth, and then overdubbed his dialog with a voice actor breathing helium. The film recovered with the gorgeous animation of the story of the Golden Army and the war between the men and the elves, but every time they flashed back to the Quonset to show young Hellboy I was cringing. I'm glad we got to see John Hurt, but they could have done so much better. Kristin pointed out that the Howdy Doody stuff set up the puppet-y look of the folktale, which I hadn't thought about. So they thought it through, clearly, and then spent all their time making the animation gorgeous without making young Hellboy work.
Older Hellboy worked, for the most part, but it's hard to tell how much of this was built into the screenplay and how much is just Ron Perlman being born to play that role. There were elements of the Liz/Hellboy relationship which felt like a bad sitcom--the pregnancy secret, the lowest-common-denominator gender dynamics. By way of contrast, elements of the Abe/Hellboy relationship which felt sitcom-y as well, but for the most part they worked. The "Red"/"Blue" dynamic felt very comfortable and established and believable, and the beer 'n Barry scene may have been, on one level, cliched, but I was laughing my ass off. In some ways that scene illustrated something that worked in the first movie, which was that while Hellboy may be a huge scary impossible guy with a dark destiny who gets tossed around by scary monsters, but emotionally he's just a guy. He and Abe care about each other because they're both freaks, and they both know what it is to feel like any connections beyond that--particularly romantic ones--are impossible.
Given that they made that relationship feel real, the potential was there for the movie to at least equal its predecessor. There are genuine laughs and character moments and gorgeous things everywhere; they just don't flow together, or even connect in a way that's remotely satisfying. Clearly Del Toro's palette has more glitter on it than Mike Mignola's, and the noir aspect is missing from this film; and as others have said, there are times when the creatures feel like leftover concepts from "Pan's Labyrinth." That's not really the problem; when we're given the chance to look at them, they're still stunning. It's just that in sequences like the Troll Market scenes we are overloaded with things to look at, and the impact is somewhat lost.
The action doesn't suck, either, although even here there is frustration. In the climactic battle we see Johann and Hellboy (who, in the world of the comics, have never met--but I quibble) kick ass, but Liz and Abe just stand around with their guns and miraculously avoid being ground to bone pudding.* The blocking, in general, is a bit sloppy. It also weakens the otherwise Very Cool scene in which Prince Nuada takes on his father's guards; the action is cool, but the king's bodyguards make no effort to remove the king from danger or even to interpose themselves between him and the prince. The opening shoot-wildly-at-the-tiny-monsters scene is (ahem) scattershot at best. And there is one genuinely bad fight scene, when Hellboy faces the elemental--the effects are great, particularly the gorgeous aftermath, but the entire confrontation becomes "shoot the monster three times in the head." Yeah, I know Hellboy is holding a baby in his tail, but Chow Yun Fat did that decades ago. (Well, not the tail. You know what I mean.)
Perhaps the biggest problem is that the center of this movie isn't Hellboy, it's Nuada, and yet the movie doesn't engage sufficiently with the complexity of what he stands for and what he's trying to do. (As
nihilistic_kid points out, our heroes are on the wrong side of a genocide-in-progress.) In the first film Hellboy was the key--literally, and that's probably the only time this year you'll see that word used correctly--and his destiny was the central conflict of the film. Here Hellboy is kind of along for the ride, his only emotional connection being a story that his adoptive father read to him fifty years ago. So yeah, he's saving the world, but that's pretty much what we expect from our action and fantasy films these days. I'm not arguing for weepy soul-searching, because this is a ass-kicking movie and no mistake. (Combine the two and you get soul-kicking. Or ass . . . never mind.) But it could have been a smart one, and a careful one, and it's not.*("Doesn't he know bones are crunchy?" Yes, I saw "Get Smart" recently, too. Sadly, it may have been better than this movie.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-14 11:36 pm (UTC)To my taste, this movie edged out Iron Man -- which was solid until the end, and bolstered by one brilliant performance, as the movie of the summer so far. Which is not saying much. After those two, Get Smart's probably my favorite, followed by Hulk, and then quite a drop before you get to Hancock or Wanted. I have not yet seen Kung Fu Panda or the new Pixar film.
It has not been a good year for movies. But Hellboy II is the first movie so far I can see myself watching again.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-14 11:58 pm (UTC)I think, in the final analysis, that I still liked the movie, and I have no doubt I'll watch it again (maybe as soon as this week); but I did have trouble turning off my critical brain, and I can't deny that it was disappointing in several respects. At this point I'd still put "Iron Man" ahead of it (haven't seen Hulk or Wall-E, and I have no interest in Hancock) because of the performances there. I actually wonder if that film hasn't spoiled me for action films without incredible actors, because I couldn't stop thinking how much more interesting the Nuada and Nuala characters might have been if they'd been acted by someone with chops.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-15 02:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-15 03:05 am (UTC)Selma Blair, yeah. She looks good, but she is double plus ungood at selling the dialogue--especially when it's along the lines of "He's trying to help! Can't you see?"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-15 07:31 pm (UTC)