Give 'em Heck, Boy!
Hellboy (2004)

I came to the film the same way most people did; I'd never read a Hellboy comic book. But having seen enough bad comic adaptations over the years, it was a surprise to see how confidently the film started out. The film leaps into Hellboy's origin without some studio exec stopping to wonder, "Will those slobs out in the audience believe any of this?" From that point, the film plows ahead almost full-speed.
It's a good thing they go that fast, because otherwise, we'd notice the villains are pathetic. They're a combination of the two favorite friends of lazy screenwriters, Nazis and Satanists. These are people who are evil because...well, because you gotta have somebody who's evil, and you don't want to think hard about why.
That's the flaw that keeps Hellboy from real greatness. Most of Hellboy's work is fighting big, ugly CGI monsters. But the part that's supposed to make us really love him is his struggle with the temptation to chuck all the good-guy stuff and become the advance man for Hell on Earth. The film does reach that point in the climax. But it would have been so much more thrilling, more deeply moving, if Hell had better advocates. If the villains had done more to really tempt him, not just standard killing.
The head bad guy is Gregor Rasputin (Karel Roden), the real, historical Rasputin, apparently now immortal and a sorcerer. After he reappears in the present day, his evil consists of materializing and dematerializing every once in a while to remind us he's here. "Boo. I'm here. Presto. I'm gone." There's his main squeeze, Ilsa (Biddy "Bridget" Hodson), a blonde dominatrix whom Rasputin gives eternal life, beauty and youth. With those gifts, she should be seducing and destroying the good guys, not simply being a handmaiden for the pop-up villain.
The one interesting bad guy is Kroenin (Ladislav Beren), a self-mutilating psycho who's apparently run on clockworks. But since he has cut off his own lips, he has no dialog. He can only march along and kill people on command.
The lack of solid villains is unfortunate, because the good guys are some of the best-written comic book heroes in years. Ron Perlman plays Hellboy like a plumber or a carpet installer; killing a monster is just another job, and he looks forward to playing with his cats and smoking a good stogie. Instead of Perlman's Elizabethan romantic monster of the Beauty and the Beast TV show, Hellboy is a real mensch. You couldn't stand being around Vincent in his sewers with his beloved Katherine, but you could have a blast playing pool with "Big Red."
Equally good is FBI agent John Meyers (Rupert Evans). He's the normal guy who represents us audience members; he reacts to things the way we would if we were in the movie. He finds himself in a romantic triangle with Hellboy and the neurotic goth girl Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a pyrokinetic with barely-controlled powers. She is just so fragile, so tortured, you can't help but fall in love with her.
The great moment in the film isn't the predictable big climax with explosions. It's when Meyers takes Sherman on a date, and Hellboy shadows them. He's just like every insecure teenage boy when he sees his girl dating someone else. He throws pebbles at Sherman every once in a while to try and break up their date. He's so desperate he even takes romantic advice from a pre-teen girl on a rooftop (Rory Copus). With that scene – not with the makeup and effects - we buy into Hellboy's existence. That alone makes the movie worth the rising price of admission.

Photo Copyright Sony Pictures
Thomas E. Reed is a television engineer in Orlando, Florida. He will probably buy this film on DVD, which he doesn't often do. He almost wanted to buy the Hellboy backpack with the BPRD logo patches, but it would probably get him arrested as a terrorist if he took it on an airplane. You can e-mail him at hatemail@off-model.com