What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Hellboy 2

A bit of a departure for us Balloonists today:

The movie Hellboy 2: The Golden Army begins with a bedtime story told by John Hurt, accompanied by a CG animation montage that looks as if it were cast with Lego Bionicles and hand-carved wooden dolls. Later, the film takes in some vicious, piranha-like Tooth Fairies; an elephantine 8-foot troll named Mr. Wink; some drunken product placement, courtesy of Tecate Beer; a brash singalong, courtesy of Barry Manilow (Jesus H!); the most diverting menagerie of critters since early Star Wars; and not one but two love stories, one involving the demonic Hellboy and his pyrokinetic lady love and the other involving, well, a fish-man and an elf. Oh, and there's a faceless ectomorph in a diving suit who speaks with a comical German accent, a troll lady with a deathly fear of canaries, and an Angel of Death that is the most exhilarating take on that idea I've seen since Terry Gilliam et al.'s Baron Munchhausen. There's also a ton of fighting, a shameless baby-in-jeopardy scene, a cameo by Howdy Doody, and a bunch of bathetic guy talk about how girls are hard to understand (the more bathetic because the guys are the demon and the fish-man). Man, this movie is just plain weird.

Adapted by Guillermo del Toro & Co. from Mike Mignola's spry and elastic comic book franchise, Hellboy 2 is a large-hearted, sentimental, at times unabashedly silly movie that gets by on the lived-in charisma of its (distinctly non-CG) characters, its heart-on-sleeve emotional lunges, its design sense, and, perhaps above all, its dense, detailed, critter-filled fantasy world. Del Toro has opened the floodgates here, in an epic of glorious self-indulgence, and as a result the movie is endlessly fun to watch.

(The NY Times has an interesting article showing some of Del Toro's design concepts, hinting at the kind of visual intelligence at work.) The movie's also emotionally gratifying, a pleasure to root for even, because Del Toro et al. have not forgotten to write to their characters and to give the audience emotive toeholds just about everywhere.

If the critters are what drew me to the film (well, that and my admiration for Del Toro's auteurist horror/fantasy films Cronos, The Devil's Backbone, and Pan's Labyrinth), what stays with me more than anything is the humor. I find myself thinking back to the gags, the funny business. The movie has a lot of it, from the start: sentimental comedy of a sort that John Ford might have approved. Overall, it plays to the crowd in an old-fashioned, I'm-not-too-cool-to-care way that I found endearing.

Besides this unashamedly corny sentimentality (nestled right next to Del Toro's love of spectacle and Lovecraftian creepiness) is a visual playfulness that pops up everywhere: in its obvious setpieces, of course, where there are all kinds of grace notes, but also in its nooks and crannies and along its seams: a paraplegic goblin tinkerer in a hand-propelled wheelbarrow; a tumor in the form of a baby, clinging to the very chest out of which it has grown; a floral giant that is close as the movies probably will get to a proper Swamp Thing. By the time the film got to its climax, involving a clattering clockwork army that lends a kind of Kirbyesque dynamic (or, if you like, yet another case of Harryhausen envy) to the action, I found myself sated and well stoned.

Design-wise, Hellboy 2 is a de facto sequel to Pan's Labyrinth, but it does not have that film's depth. To be honest, Hellboy's soap-opera conflicts seemed a bit rushed (I would have like a few more minutes), and, anyway, the film is too suffused with good feeling to grab us by the nerves. Whereas Pan's Labyrinth is a profound fairy tale, a conundrum-poser, and at times deeply unsettling, Hellboy 2, like Hellboy the first, is a knockabout action movie. What makes 2 more delightful than the first Hellboy is that it's undisguisedly an action comedy, with an eager, bustling cast of freaks. There's no "normal" here, which is precisely why the characters' gestures toward "normalcy" are poignant and funny.

 

Del Toro is both more antic and more romantic than creator Mike Mignola; though comic and film alike are puckish and fun, the comic boasts a narrative streamlining and a gift for poker-faced understatement that Del Toro sidelines in favor of warm-hearted excess. Hellboy himself is still a study in would-be laconic cool, but in the hands of Del Toro and Ron Perlman he's also mopey, lovestruck, and dumb, a kind of punchy, ADHD-afflicted teenage lout with a heart of gold. The film struggles to give him some nobility in spite of these qualities -- a tragic nobility on par with Karloff's Frankenstein (who is overtly referenced) -- but, still, this Hellboy is a goofball.

Also, Del Toro et al. depart from Mignola's stark palette. The Hellboy comics, despite terrific color, have a thing for extreme chiaroscuro: clotted darkness; huge, sharp, defining shadows; a certain graphic crispness. Hellboy 2 overturns this in favor of a visual surface crawling with detail. That the details seem handcrafted and palpable (more puppetry and prosthetics than digital rendering) is a gift: but for its final donnybrook with the Bionicle-creatures, the movie relies less on CG than on things actual human performers could wear and manipulate on set. The proverbial breath of fresh air!

I won't go further into the details, the performances, etc. here, except to note that the movie gets a real lift from the redoubtable Doug Jones (he of the expressive hands) as Abe Sapien and two other critters. I'll just end by saying that this deliciously absurd film, a more satisfying goulash than the first, does a fine job of translating the visual repertory of the comics into a different yet equally striking aesthetic of its own. Also, I'll note that everyone in my family enjoyed this film. Every one of us laughed out loud at times because of the headstrong and sometimes confused and pitiable characters, the comic repartee between them, and of course Del Toro's reckless, overflowing ingenuity. Any one of Del Toro's more personal films has greater emotional oomph and symbolic resonance, but, man, Hellboy 2 is still a trip.