Red Right Hand

Hellboy Movie is bad. Even if Guillermo Del Toro and company were able to fight off requests for a Blue Hellboy or an Incredible Hulkboy, they seem to have let the soul of the character slip through their red, stoney hand. On the outside, Hellboy is a bulky, crimson demon with shaved down horn and a collossal rock of a right hand, which as far as he has figured out is good for smashing things. Movie Hellboy is very insecure with this form, having been raised by humans. All Movie Hellboy really wants is to be a real boy, to freely associate with people. He is driven by this desire. In an effort to close the gap between him and the social life of man, he raises cats, watches cartoons, falls in love and, in general, becomes the quintessential, stereotypical, run-of-the-mill freak. On the other hand, comics Hellboy (the real Hellboy) doesn't really care. He sees himself as being part of humanity, even if a giant, abnormal part. In fact, humanity sees him as part of humanity (the United Nations gave him Honorary Human status in 1952). The central conflict for the source material Hellboy is his stuggle to eradicate his relation with demons/evil despite his Nazi-funded inception as the key to armageddon (something which plays out quite literally in the film). While the difference between the two is subtle, it's integral to the identity and actions of Hellboy.

You see, Hellboy's superpower is not shooting flames out of his eyes or eating your soul; he can't lift objects with his mind, he can't fly, he doesn't command the weather and he certainly has no psychic ability. What Hellboy does do is get the crap beat out of him. As he hunts down what are essentially his own kind, Hellboy is pummelled to the edge of death, his strength and durability lasting him just long enough for heaven and fate to sign an agreement on how to get him out of the mess. And the movie captures this (and, off the subject, the color pallette) fairly well. But again, the movie misses the essence of his beatings. Hellboy is humanity's scapegoat, taking the brunt of Hell's active attempts to seize the world, buying time for providence to patiently reveal itself. He isn't Clifford the Big, Red Dog, he's the friggin' hinge of of the apocalypse. He has to fight to prevent it, but his encounters put him closer to the thing he is really meant to be by Hell.

If the spirit is gone, the shell is empty.

The plot that the movie is based on, "Seed of Destruction", certainly needed some filling in order to make a quality, full-length feature film. But instead of adding additional plot or remixing the Hellboy series (like what we saw with X-Men 2), Hellboy Movie's creators made scattered tweaks that are more destructive to the essence of the story than removing Hellboy's horns would have been. For instance. The frogmen of the comics have become hellhounds... who lay frog eggs, are amphibious and have long tongues for grabbing prey. Why!? Why!? It's a classic and pointless Hollywood tweak that helps to wipe away the myth and lore Hellboy stories are drawn from. Another glaring alteration not directly related to the Hellboy character is Kroenen. In the comics, the guy is a masked, laboratory-dwelling rogue among the Nazi collective that summons Hellboy; in Hellboy Movie he's a particularly noisy and particularly showy (in Star Wars Kid fashion) assassin. While it adds a mini-boss to the film, it does nothing to build upon the source story in any meaningful way. Again, we have a ineffectual, standard Hollywood "solution". The gilled assistant to Hellboy, Abe Sapien has also been altered, this time into a nerdy jester, the intended comic relief. I always felt like Abe played the straight man to Hellboy's smarmy attitude in the comics; it may just be the rebel in me, but I have a hard time believing that a comic relief character was necessary especially when he gets written out of the story in Act 2. Also an ill-advised move since in the book Abe kills the Rasputin "head boss" (see the paragraph on Hellboy in action above for an understanding of why it works this way). The film's creators sell-out minor elements left-and-right, while defending their ability to create Hellboy exactly as he appeared in the comics.

There are moments in Hellboy that work extremely well, the fight scenes, a scene where Hellboy spies on his love interest and another agent out on a friendly date, the general adherence to the source. But the movie takes a slightly problematic adaptation and makes it more scatter-brained and incoherent while attempting the exact opposite.

The bar for action comic book movies is pretty low, though, and I really feel the movie is no worse than most of that crop. Spiderman was maybe a tad better, and X2 and the early Batman movies look down from the tops of Gotham City skyscrapers at Hellboy. But for the most part, it's on par for the course.

The larger issue is that the filmmaking community still has no idea how to adapt a comic book, an absolutely ridiculous point since the storyboards are basically laid out for them ahead of time. These aren't 400-page novels with internal narrative; they're very simple projects... Few lessons have been learned from the exceptions (the action movies above plus Ghost World and American Splendor). This saddens me because the Watchmen movie is going to get made some day, and I'm afraid one of the great pinnacles of comics is going to be merely satisfactory.