One Of The Better Comic Book Films I’ve Seen
I had not seen Hellboy before, but was advised by friends to expect a very good comic book movie. While I have seen better, it’s certainly not the worst of the bunch either. The film begins with the deranged Rasputin and the Nazi occult attempted to open a portal to another dimension. When they do, a baby demon passes through onto Earth and is captured and raised by Professor Bloom, played by John Hurt. Hurt begins a new bureau in the FBI, Paranormal Research and Defense, who uses Hellboy and his aquatic friend Abe Sapien to help track down and kill ‘bad’ monsters. The primary plot however is the resurrection of Rasputin and his hopes to unleash and apocalypse on Earth. There are also two interesting subplots involving a love interest in pyrokinetic Liz, and the developing friendship between Agent Myers and Hellboy.
At some points I was reminded of Ghostbusters, which you can take as being good or bad; big scary monster in a public place, chaos ensues, Hellboy and team must flush it out and kill it. The action was a little routine at times and Hellboy is full of cheesy one liners and says “oh, crap” four or five times during the movie which didn’t help him be anymore interesting. This may sound very picky but I was expecting a tougher, darker character for Hellboy, which may not be what Mignola does in the comics, I’m not sure. On the other hand the coolest and strongest character of the movie is Kroenen, a badass assassin character who never says a word and has had his eyelids and lips surgically removed. He was a really cool character and made the film a lot better to me.
The story is pretty far-fetched and maybe too out there for comic book movie fans that want something a little more down to earth, but it’s put together fairly well and it works for what it is. At no point was I really engaged with the story; i.e., I was never concerned if the bad guys would win or not, as besides Kroenen, Rasputin and his female cohort weren’t interesting or intimidating. Likewise the evil monsters seemed generic and they left me kind of bored. Overall Hellboy isn’t the worst comic book movie I have seen, but it isn’t in my top five or so either. It’s a little too goofy and routine at times and it just didn’t capture my full attention.
Eyes And Ears
On Blu-ray, Hellboy looks excellent, for the most part. I had some issue with some of the close up shots and some environment scenes whereby the image quality suffered from having that compressed look to it, i.e. the blocky looking textures. Other than that happening at a few spots in the movie, it looked excellent. I especially liked the snowy scenes. The fire effects for Liz were nicely done and one of the extra features is actually an explanation of how they did it and what look the effects people and the director were going for. The audio is uncompressed PCM 5.1 sound like most Blu-ray releases, and it sounds awesome. Thunderous booms, crisp voices, and a great sense of ambience and atmosphere add a lot to the presentation of the movie.
Hellboy fans have a nice set of extras to look forward to here, although they aren’t as complete as the previous three-disc release on SDVD. There is a very long, 144-minute ‘making of’ documentary featuring cast interviews and lots of behind the scenes footage. There are also three ‘video effects making of’ features that talk about how a particular effect was achieved, which is interesting. An audio commentary with the director is included and also a odd extra by Scott McCloud called “Guide To Understanding Comics” which is basically just a brief history of comics and different, rather boring, aspects about them.
