Hellboy in Limbo
Comic Action Doesn't Leap Off the Page

Leaving Hellboy, I was filled with a sense of emptiness. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was missing. Despite some good acting, great makeup, and amazing effects, the new comic book film just didn't meet my expectations.

I've been reading comics religiously since I was a kid, but Hellboy is not a title I was familiar with. About a month ago, I picked up a collection of the early issues to familiarize myself with it. The comic was good. The art was rough, the story a little confusing, and the characters underdeveloped, but one expects that in the early run of a title. I was already interested in seeing the film, and the comic did nothing to affect my interest either way.

The film, directed by Blade II's Guillermo del Toro, tells the story of a demon child brought to Earth by Nazi occultists during World War II. Allied troops storm the area in the midst of the arcane rites and destroy the portal meant to bring destruction to the planet, but not before "something" came through. That something was a small, red, monster with a huge stone hand. The troops called it "Hellboy" and the name stuck.

Fast-forward sixty years to the present where Hellboy (Ron Pearlman) is a mature 20-something demon working for the United States government as part of a top-secret Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. Led by his adopted father, Prof. "Broom" Bruttenholm (John Hurt), Hellboy and an unlikely cadre of "freaks" work with the feds to stop the "things that go bump in the night." Aiding Hellboy are Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, voiced by David Hyde Pierce), a mer-man with telepathic powers, and Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a pyrokenetic whose body creates a deadly blue flame.

As the story progresses, the BPRD investigates the death of six guards at the local museum. The massacre appears to be the work of a monster released from an ancient statue, but clues point to the work of the same Nazis who raised Hellboy back in the 1940s. As the BPRD tries to stop the monster from terrorizing the city, they also must try to discover the reason the Nazis have returned.

Hellboy combines some great action sequences with a wry touch of humor that makes the characters seem more real (and less heroic) than the X-Men crowd. Best of all, Perlman's performance of the giant, conflicted, bright red demon is actually sympathetic. He misses his girlfriend, he hates hiding in the Bureau's headquarters, and he has a very human affection for kittens.

On the surface, Hellboy is just another monster action movie, but the meat of the story deals with free will vs. determinism and whether genetics rather than environment determine behavior. (Of course, that's what I'm writing my Master's thesis on, so I may be reading something into all this.) While the moral majority may balk at seeing a demon as a hero, I see it as an uplifting reminder that anyone can find redemption.

All that said, however, Hellboy just didn't satisfy me. The action was good and the story was solid. The humor was funny, but clever. And, unlike most action movies, the violence was real and good people died. Maybe that's what disturbed me most. Seeing heroes, the human FBI agents working along side the BPRD, die one after another while nothing was done to save them. They were all just cannon fodder, grist for the mill.

Hellboy was good enough, however, that I may have to give it a second viewing when it comes out on DVD. If nothing else, it's a relatively good comic book movie. That alone made it enjoyable.

MY RATING: 5 out of 10.

RATED: PG-13
RUN TIME: 112 min.