FILM REVIEW: Hellboy — the devil in all of us

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The movie industry has been mining superhero comics assiduously over the last decade to produce a positive rash of big-budget superhero films. Some of these have been excellent (Batman Begins from 2005 and even the first X-Men from 2000 and the first Spiderman from 2002), others have disappeared into a well-deserved oblivion (Catwoman from 2004, Daredevil from 2003, and too many others to mention). What both the good and the bad shared were an A-List cast, or at least lead. Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy, released in 2004, starred Ron Perlman, a much loved actor, but a long way off the A-list, and for that reason it was undeservedly ignored by many. This was a great pity, as it was lovingly crafted, well-scripted, and managed to be both entertaining and thought provoking.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army takes all this a step further, and shares a special place in cinema history as a sequel that doesn’t just continue the story, but which actually departs in new directions, reaching out to new ideas, even while it riffs on established themes. It is so refreshing to see a sequel that is the result of a surfeit of creative energy rather than a cynical attempt to squeeze more money out of an established brand by making a bigger and brasher version of the original.

Having said that, The Golden Army is certainly a bigger movie, with a number of massive set pieces that are designed to blow the audience out of their seats with the overwhelming power of CGI and the other bells and whistles of modern big-budget moviemaking. One is a battle with an elemental — a spirit of the forest brought to life — and the other is a scene set in “the troll market,” a world-within-a-world in the manner of Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter series. These scenes are truly spectacular, but within all this supernatural whizz-bang imagery, Del Torro the storyteller is still hard at work establishing key ideas that move his tale forward.

Del Toro comes back to the Hellboy franchise after his triumph with the Spanish-language Pan’s Labyrinth, a film about the fantasy life of a child trying to come to terms with the conflicts in a family torn apart by the Spanish civil war. Fantasy and reality come into tragic conjunction in Pan’s Labyrinth, and Del Toro clearly believes that fantasy is very much part of our daily lives.

With The Golden Army, he boldly brings this philosophy into a mainstream Hollywood picture. More than that, some of the fantasy figures from Pan’s Labyrinth seem to have also come across on the commute. Del Toro has famously said that he made one film for Hollywood and one film for himself — he is responsible for Blade II (2002) after all — but with the Hellboy series, he seems to have found a story that allows him to blur the distinction.

Hellboy, the creation of graphic artist Mike Mignola, provides ample opportunity for Del Toro to incorporate a moral ambiguity into what on the surface looks like a straightforward superhero story. After all, the title character is a demon released from the depths of Hell who, more by accident than design, ends up working for the “good” guys. But while Hellboy has many outstanding qualities, a fully functioning moral compass is not one of them. Basically, all he really wants to do is become a famous superhero, something the secretive government agency that employs him does everything it can to prevent.