March 16, 2004

One often forgets how rare it is to go to a screening that sends studio executives into the hallway smiling and not hedging…

It happens just a handful of times every year. And Monday night was one of those screenings. The Revolution team, Larry Gordon folks, many of the Sony players and a load of people who had worked on the production were on hand, along with Guillermo del Toro, who probably had exactly as much sleep as he could get on an airplane coming to L.A. from Sunday night’s AICN screening in Austin.

Hellboy is, I believe, Revolution Studio’s 23rd feature release. Anger Management’s $136 million domestic is the best gross the company has managed. And unless something goes terribly wrong, Hellboy will set the new standard for the company.

The summer of 2004 starts on April 2.

Hellboy isn’t going to be for everybody. It isn’t as readily accessible as Spider-Man. But it is the freshest, skillful, surprising, joyous comic book movie since the first Matrix. It’s no Matrix either… Matrix brought the mindset of the comic world to a whole new universe of viewers in a way that was truly revolutionary at the time. But it’s lots of damned fun and I have a feeling that it will get better and better on multiple viewings.

I don’t really want to get into a full review of the movie. I’d need to see it again and truth be told, I’d probably take some of the fun of discovering it away from you.

But just about everything that Del Toro tries here works. The CG does get a little CG-y occasionally. And the density and screen-filling nature of some of the CG characters can be a bit disorienting at times. And the only thing I would really change is that I would edit the 15-minute opening sequence by 5 minutes, using Fernando Meirelles’ editor if necessary. It’s not that the stuff in those 15 minutes isn’t well done. It just takes a little too long and I, for one, was anxious to get to the giant red Hellboy. There is also a shot near the end that I would love to see go about 2 seconds longer for an improved comedy beat. But that’s just picking.

Ron Perlman is at the very top of his game as Hellboy. The make-up for the character is brilliant, with great attention paid to “Red’s” skin texture. John Hurt is right on, as is the young actor who plays him “60 years earlier.” The great find of the movie is “Abe Sapien,” a character that turns out to be remarkably likeable and visually compelling almost every moment he is one screen.

Del Toro manages to take these wild characters and a half-dozen more and build them so that we are comfortable that we know them well enough, in spite of minimal screen time for most of them. In fact the only character who feels at all unbalanced is Rasputin, who gets more screen time than his degree of interest deserves.

Cinematographer Guillermo Navarro and Production Designer/Art Designers Stephen Scott, Marco Bittner Rosser and Peter Francis deserve special praise. And Marco Beltrami’s score is arrogantly, unabashedly successful.

Of course, the whole shooting match comes back to Hellboy himself, the wise cracking, attitude-heavy 6’ 5” red mountain of muscle and rage. And people are going to fall in love with this guy… even the girls. One reason for the success there is that Hellboy’s ongoing love for the elusive pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, played with Johansson-like quiet by Selma Blair, actually plays, in spite of the genre. But even more importantly and unlike most superhero movies, Hellboy does what “we” might do if we had his powers. With a right hand the size of a stone-upholstered ottoman, when he wants to get somewhere, he will just as soon go through a wall as around it.

In an odd way, Hellboy reminds me of Elf, in that the directors of both films just let their leads play in a natural, audience-recognizable way. And both directors knew when to move along, milking the moments until you have just enough to remain amused.

I am a little concerned that Hellboy hasn’t really caught hold beyond the core audience of teenage boys (and some who still wish they were teens). The great commercial for Hellboy that I haven’t seen would be one that just uses the remarkable sound fx editing (Tim Nielson of Lord of the Rings) and no dialogue until one of the film’s great lines tags the end of the spot. You can really get this movie without any of the often-witty dialogue. Thing is, Hellboy will take audiences somewhere in the comic book universe that it hasn’t been before.

In the midst of the film, I was thinking of comparisons to the X-Men franchise and I thought, “apples and oranges.” Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Ian McKellan’s Magneto may be better characters than Hellboy, but there is a dark and funny weight to Hellboy that X-Men never achieves. It is, like Spider-Man, more accessible. But I believe that more complex is not a box office curse and that the only thing that can keep this film from passing the $150 million mark is a failure of marketing to draw audiences into what is joyous about this movie. The ad cycles are really just starting, so we should be fair. But people should be dying to see Abe Sapien… people should be aware that Hellboy is in love with Liz… people should be going into the theater humming the Baby Ruth gags…it is more than a big loud thing of a movie. It is remarkably sophisticated for good, dumb comic book fun.

The only problem is that the Jews are portrayed…

Oops.

But a movie about an otherworldly being who is trying to do good, but is constantly being physically beaten by the forces of evil, in which death is rarely a permanent state… whose religious experience is it anyway?

It was nice to come out of a movie smiling and happy to chatter about the film. Ella Enchanted, The Alamo, Kill Bill Volume 2, Man of Fire, 13 Going On 30, and what is looking like another great surprise, Mean Girls, are all coming in April. Summer starts in April 2 with the arrival of the big red one. Now if only WB would dump McG and hire Del Toro for Superman. Sigh.

READER OF THE DAY: THE SOUP MAN writes: “Dollars to donuts that the reason it's not having any effect on the overall box-office is that the people are going are by and large not regular moviegoers. Which is also why it will have no effect on future box-office; nobody's going to try to cater/pander to that specific and that demanding an audience. Simply put, you can't clone Jesus.

My decision is, personally, despite my own convictions and dedication, and excitement at the person of Christ being considered in popular culture, that I need not see it. What's bizarre to me is the lectures I get from fellow churchgoers, the insistence that viewing it is tantamount to a religious act of obedience. It's a strange kind of masochism, this suffering for one's faith through the reenacted torture and death of one's savior. Reminds me of those pilgrims who, in some parts of the world, following quite literally in the footsteps of Our Lord, taking up their own, literal crosses and having themselves flailed and, yes, even beaten to death. Except that this brand of North American devotion only goes so far as paying full-price and enduring 2 hours of staged horror.

Still trying to give up the web for Lent…”

E ME: Were you excited about the Boy before today’s column? After?