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Hellboy

Movie Hellboy Director Guillermo del Toro Cast Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Rupert Evans, John Hurt

By Subhash K Jha

Oh, hell! Making a movie with a hero who looks like a 8-footer with a face left to boil too long on the kitchen stove and a skin pigmentation that resembles a Holi colour scheme gone for a scream, isn�t easy. The lure is irresistible. The wickedly escapist world of comicbook entertainment gives filmmakers the freedom to express themselves in ricocheting shades of black and fight. Of late Hollywood seems to be returning to the basic pleasures of uni-dimensional cartoon strips. After Lara Croft, X Men and Kill Bill 2 (the last, not directly adapted from a cartoon but neverthless embracing cartoonish traits wholesale) here comes Hellboy about a diabolic monkey (?) discovered during Nazi Germany who grows up to be Ron Perlman with blood-red smeared all over his skin like a bestial birthmark. This is one film where one can ask, �Have you �red� the comicbook?� and not be ridiculed for asking trivial details. Indeed detailing is the high point of writer-director Guillermo del Toro�s direction. For those who are familiar with this Mexican director�s work (remember his debut film The Mimic about monster-cockroaches on a rampage in New York) you know how he mingles the mood of the macabre with an ongoing sense of fun. This mix of terror and laughter, so peculiar to comicbook films is here highlighted in splendid sequences of formulistic characterizations and predictable humour. You warm up to the people and their prattle not for their novelty but their audacious familiarity. And even though the protagonist is a looming lumbering monster-monkey he succeeds in creating a sense of endearing intimacy with the audience. In one stylishly done shootout in an underground railway station (there�re loads of track wreck-odds) �Good Monster� Hellboy fights the bad monsters with a distressed commuter�s kitten clutched to his benign hands. Monster in-cower-perated? Oh dear. There�s also a love triangle that grows among the gross Hellboy, a pyrokinetic female companion Liz (Selma Blair) and an investigative officer (Rupert Evans). Just how they manage to create a cinematically absorbing conflict among them is a mystery best left unrevealed, between the director and the writer(both of whom happen to the same!). The cinematographer Guillermo Navarro shoots the night scenes in a blue hue. The action scenes, much of them shot on skidding wheels are heart-in-the-mouth funny. A lack of self-importance sees this grisly-going-into-cute comicstrip trip down to the finishing line. The allusions to Frankenstein and his master-creator pop up with intermittent emphasis in scenes between Pearlman and John Hurt who nurtures the monster. But finally you can�t but agree with one of the characters who looks with a sneer at Hellboy and says, "After you finish eliminating all the monsters, the fact remains you�re one too." It�s in the way the film subverts the monster images to make them cute, if not entirely, likeable, that director Guillermo del Toro has won won huge boxoffice takings all over the world for Hellboy. See it with an open mind, and don�t let rationale cloud your sense of elemental fun�and you�ll find Hellboy enjoyable for its storm-in-a-teacup attitude to lowbrow entertainment. In one sequence Hellboy while writing a love letter wonders what�s a good substutute-word for �need�. "Need is a good word," he�s told sagely. The conversations never go beyond the mundane. And there lies the secret behind the film�s success. A monster-hero who isn�t a monstrous soul making his point in a film that has no soul.