No sooner do I make the foolish claim that any trip to the cinema is capable of holding my rapt attention and giving me that special movie feeling, I get proved wrong. Tim, Yaz and I went to see Hellboy II this evening and, though I didn't hate it, I certainly didn't love it as much as I wanted to.
I adored the first movie, and the director of this one is the same guy who made Pan's Labyrinth, one of my all-time favourites, so I was convinced it would be an immediate hit. How could it possibly go wrong, combining excellent characters with the powerful imagination of Guillermo del Toro?
But I couldn't shake the feeling that someone had given the man a big pile of money and a checklist of Things That Must Go In This Movie and told him that, as long as he ticked every box, he could do whatever the hell he liked.
Not seeming to be a natural superhero movie director, I don't think del Toro has any vested interest in the fame and fortune of our hero, and that really showed - important pieces of character development were skipped over in single sentences, the humour was lame and cheesy and there were far too few emotional hooks. The Dark Knight this was not.
Instead we were treated to the unbridled imagination of a true visionary, something I would normally have been thrilled to watch - but I didn't go there to watch a fairytale, I went to watch Hellboy.
The creatures del Toro dreamed up were fantastical, weird, wonderful, beautiful, awesome - all the good words. You'd have thought that, having combined a similar sort of imaginary world with the painfully stark tale of a little girl caught in the middle of a war, he would find it child's play to balance the character-driven part of the story with the big visual thrills.
Not so, at least not to me. You know when the sound levels on a programme are all rickety and badly balanced, so you can hear that people are talking, but they're so muffled by the music and effects that you've no clue what they're saying? This movie had the same effect. Hellboy was an aside in his own movie, brushed over for the sake of the glorious menagerie.
It picks up in the second half - especially humour-wise - but by then it was all a bit too late. I wanted to see into Hellboy's soul with glimpses of his love for Liz and his relationships with the other characters, but none of that interested del Toro. Even the fight scenes felt ever so slightly as if he didn't really want to do them. There was a visible contrast between the things his heart was in, and the things his heart was not.
But I will still be waiting excitedly for the next Hellboy, should there be one, as my faith has not been shaken in this franchise. And as for Guillermo del Toro, I will be praying someone hands him just the stack of cash next time, so we can clamber back into his world without that checklist getting in the way.
3 comments:
I realised many hours later that although Liz was pretty much onscreen all the way through, she didn't actually do anything except screech "WATCH OUT RED!" then burst into flames, the latter of which seemed to get the team out of several difficult spots but only after she'd stood around open-mouthed for a few minutes while other people died.
Such a shame. I heart Selma Blair.
I was too preoccupied with everything else to even notice that, but you're quite right!
...as I have already bored you to tears telling you at lunchtime.
oh no! i really liked it! I thought Luke Goss as that Nuada was AMAZING. And beautiful...
Anyway! I enjoyed this one more than the first one. PMSL at the Northern Irish bloke! So I did.
I thought the start was very like LOTR though.
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