Fast forward sixty years. Raised by the now elderly occultist (an
unrecognizably wizened John Hurt), Hellboy has reached the fullness of
demonhood, which is to say he resembles an NFL lineman after several
sunscreen-free days in Tahiti. Because he ages in "reverse dog years,"
however, he's essentially still an adolescent--a fact which causes
considerable consternation for the group that employs both him and his
surrogate father, a secret branch of the FBI called the Bureau for
Paranormal Research and Defense. Also on the team are a
hyper-intelligent fishman (David Hyde Pierce does the voice, but the guy
wearing the gills is actor/mime Doug Jones, who played the lead
Gentleman in the famous "Buffy" episode "Hush"); a pretty and
pyrokinetic lass (Selma Blair) for whom Hellboy carries a torch; and a
young new FBI recruit (Rupert Evans) brought on board to babysit
Hellboy. Describing the group's purpose to him, Hurt explains, "There are things that go bump in the night. ... And we
are the ones who bump back." Such bumping is soon called for, when
Rasputin and his Nazi cohorts (one of them an assassin with a fetish for
surgical self-mutilation) return to reopen up the otherworldly portal
and bring about the end of the world. Chaos, of course, ensues.
If the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises found their inspiration in the '60s and '70s heyday of Marvel comics, Hellboy
reaches back still further. Though the comic itself, by Mike Mignola,
has only been around for a decade, it recalls the pulp adventures of the
'30s and '40s (Doc Savage, The Shadow, etc.) in which the heroes still
used firearms and hadn't yet discovered lycra--Hellboy, for his part, is
partial to a leather trenchcoat and bullets filled with "holy water,
clove leaves, silver shavings, white oak, the works." It was also a time
before the A-bomb helped science replace the supernatural in our
collective nightmares. (Though it's often noted that Japan's postwar
monster fixation--Godzilla, Rodan, Gamera--was a sublimation of nuclear
paranoia, the same connection is rarely drawn with America's '60s spate
of radiation-spawned superheroes--Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic
Four.) Del Toro cultivates the comic's pulp aesthetic with noirish
dialogue and cinematography, anachronistic props (Hellboy smokes
cigars), and occasional hints of a secret history beyond the confines of
the movie itself. After showing his new recruit a collection of
supernatural paraphernalia collected by the Nazis, Hurt notes that "[i]n
1958, the occult wars finally come to an end with the death of Adolph
Hitler." Evans: "1945, you mean. Hitler died in '45." Hurt: "Did he
now?"
All this would likely be for naught, however, if it weren't for the
casting of Ron Perlman as Hellboy. Perlman is a thoughtful, charismatic
actor who for years has labored under the handicap that he just doesn't
look very much like a human being. His big break before Hellboy
was playing Vincent, the soulful lion-man with whom Linda Hamilton (and
unconscionable millions of female viewers) fell in love on the '80s show
"Beauty and the Beast." Since then, he's played a hunchback (The Name of the Rose), a goat-man (The Island of Dr. Moreau), a circus freak (The City of Lost Children), a skull-faced alien (Star Trek: Nemesis), and a vampire (Blade II), among others. (To his credit, he somehow managed not to be drafted into the atrocious remake of Planet of the Apes.)
He's also done a great deal of voice work--if your child has played a
video game in the last decade, they have probably heard him amid the
digitized carnage. Perlman's big jaw and overslung brow made him an
obvious choice for Hellboy--the comic looks as though it was drawn with
him in mind--but still better suited is his manner, a gruff swagger
tempered by childlike vulnerability. (Think a re-fanged Vincent.)
Hellboy may flip SUVs like tiddlywinks and force feed explosives to
giant extraterrestrial anemones, but he also files his horns down with a
belt sander in an effort to "fit in." And he pines unrequitedly for his
incendiary sweetheart, even soliciting romantic advice from a
nine-year-old in one of the movie's funnier sequences. The
tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-mush role is a clichéd one, but Perlman
handles it with dignity--no mean feat when you're wearing 50 pounds of
red latex--overplaying neither the macho nor the maudlin. Hellboy won't help Perlman much with his typecasting as a sensitive monster. But at least this time he may get a sequel out of it.
