Hellboy
April 5, 2004Grade: C+
This weekend was the first time in quite a while that I went to see a first-run movie instead of waiting for it to come to the dollar theatre. And as luck would have it, I wish I had waited on this particular flick.
Apparently Hellboy is a comic book but not one I’ve ever read. And maybe that’s the problem–I just couldn’t get into this movie. Or maybe that’s the movie’s fault.
Anyway, the story is that the Nazis attempted to open a portal to hell, but an entrepid group of American G.I.’s manages to stop them. Not however before something came thru the portal–a little devil-boy who is adopted by the Americans and grows up to become a force for good, named Hellboy. Unfortinately the Nazis who made the first portal (kept forever young apparently by the power of evil) come back in modern time and try again.
Now Ron Perlman is probably the perfect casting for Hellboy–big, brutish, cigar-chomping, wise-cracking. But the jokes never seemed all that funny, and the villains were never that frightening. And while the battle scenes were all pretty good, they also always seemed to happen in dark places so you couldn’t see things clearly. That’s probably intentional, since the movie was made for a relatively modest $60 million they probably wanted to make things a bit murky so you couldn’t really pick out any problems with the special effects.
It just never really engaged me. It was not a total waste of time, nor however is it a movie I’ll want to see again.
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