Recently many movies have been made based on the comic book heroes of the past. Some have been good, some have been bad, but none of them have been as horrible as Hellboy, the story of a half-devil/half-man superhero.
The story begins with World War II Nazis opening the portal to all evil and sending it into our world. Hellboy (Ron Perlman), borne out of these “evildoers,” is adopted by a Scottish scientist played by John Hurt and brought up to do good and fight evil. This Scottish scientist, who becomes known to Hellboy as father, happens to run the Bureau of Paranormal activity at the FBI. When evil returns, Hellboy fights evil along with several other random “freak-like” creatures from another dimension and a few random earth-borne people.
Some random conflicts occur when Hellboy falls in love with the self-combusting Liz (Selma Blair), and when Hellboy is confronted with her death or the death of the world.
The story revolves around the bad guys, including Grigori Rasputin, who serves the devil himself. Along with his sidekick, who is invincible due to the fact that he is made out of dust and is obsessed with random surgeries, Rasputin goes on a search for Hellboy so that he will grant them entry to the evil world, since he is the key.
The movie’s animation could be interesting if the plot didn’t move so slowly. It takes about 10 different scenes of fighting with ugly dogs with big tongues and about a dozen small fragments of a plot line to even get close to coming to the end. Then Hellboy must travel into the depths of the earth in order to revenge the death of his “father” the scientist.
The movie’s plot line is barely cohesive. It’s more a tumble of extraterrestrial action mixed with a semi-storyline. As people are constantly fighting the dog-like skeleton creatures that keep blooming from the ground and sewers, a storyline somewhat develops that the portal back into evil can be found somewhere in Moscow. Now they must travel to fight more of these ugly dogs and Rasputin in order to defeat evil. But don’t worry — Hellboy can fight them, because he’s half-devil/half-man anyway.
Sophomore David Glotter found it hard to keep his eyes open during Hellboy. “The movie could barely keep me awake, let alone entertained, for the two long hours I sat there trying to watch the movie.”
The story goes on for more than two hours. Just when it seems likely that the film is about to end, it keeps going, with more fighting and unnecessary shooting. There is an obvious battle of conscience when Hellboy must choose whether to turn to evil as he is destined or help save the will of man. The movie could be suspenseful if it didn’t seem like the same scene repeating itself over and over again — Hellboy fighting, getting his butt kicked for a little while, and then coming back to beat up evil.
Some people may say that the movie holds true to the comic-book story that the film is based on, but then the comic book must have been even more boring to read. If there was a shred of interesting storyline within those short comic-book stories, it was dragged out, ripped apart and messily put back together in what seems like a rush for the movie producers to release something.
Grade: D
