“Hell No: A look at why Hellboy II let me way down”

“Oh crap.” –Hellboy

When you go to a movie, you’re entering a conflict on defense.  A group of people is going to come in front of you and display something to you, and you react.  Now, there are different kinds of movies, and many different expectations.

“Hellboy II” has an interesting mess of expectations going for it.  It’s based on a brilliant and reliable comic book, but the first film was at best “loosely” based on the comics.  Instead, it took some of the look, characters, and ideas and threw them somewhere fully different.  Hellboy doesn’t hide from the public, he isn’t madly in love with Liz Sherman, and he’s a lot more… mature in many ways.  Now, about that first film, it’s a good movie.  It sure isn’t great, because it has one of the most anti-climatic third acts EVER.  The movie deflates, imploding upon itself in a painfully dull fashion.  Which is a shame, because most of the movie was interesting enough, and it really does have some great moments.  And those moments are very well visualized by Guillermo del Toro.  His name brings a lot of expectations with this new film.  You can’t help but bring expectations based off of “Blade II” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” to the film.

So, with the offensive line revealed, let’s be blunt: “Hellboy II” is overrated.

I do not, at all, understand this heaping of praise coming at this movie.  I keep hearing things about “Star Wars”, and I just want to say to everybody making that comparison, you can shut the hell up before I shove a proton torpedo up your rear.  About the only two things those two movies have in common is a lot of cool real-world effects and a scary lack of black people.  Yes, “Hellboy II” looks cool.  If you liked “Transformers”, you may like “Hellboy II”.  But, if you saw “Transformers” as the vapid piece of junk it was… well, let’s have a discussion. 

Here come the spoilers.

Half an hour into “Hellboy II”, I was pretty sure I was in for some suck.  This was for three reasons:

1) We had zero “development”.  None of the characters had looked at each other long enough to evoke anything more than a passing conversation.  And the reverse-development of Manning (Tambor) and Hellboy (Perlman) with their working relationship from the end of the last film was baffling.

2) There was a scene where people argued in front of a council.  Let me give anyone out there who wants to make a movie a tip-- council scenes are VERY HARD to pull off.  George Lucas can’t do it.  The Wachowski brothers can’t do it.  Peter Jackson did it ONCE, and that was because 50% of the people in his council have some pretty serious acting skills.  Anytime you stick a bunch of important, stuffy people in a room to have an argument, it usually launches into one guy giving a speech and getting pissy, and ends very blah.  Even though this council scene ended in a bloodbath, I was still not amused.

3) They had already told me, rather explicitly, how the movie was going to end.  Much, much more bitching on this point later.

So, half an hour in, I’m sitting there pulling a Hellboy.  “Oh crap.”  And watching this movie play out is a damned train wreck.  It’s like Del Toro made a list of stuff that has an interesting idea, and then made it boring and didn’t explore it.  Don’t get me wrong here and defend him on this by saying, “oh, that’s the point- to make these extraordinary things common”.  I’m gonna lay some money down that I’ve probably read more Hellboy than you, and I understand the way “absurd” works.  Demons lamenting that they’ve lost an acolyte to pancakes is awesome. 

( http://www.brandonbird.com/photos/pancakes.jpg ) Pancakes are normal things.  A demon eating them is funny.  But the real home run comes from the “oh no” factor of the other demons realizing that they have lost one of their crew because he ate pancakes.  The emotional pay-off’s.

The EXACT opposite of this scenario takes place in “Hellboy II”.  About fifteen minutes in we’re told Liz Sherman is pregnant.  This gives us a TON of potential for pay-off!  There’s the “you’re carrying the child of a demon” thing, the “how does this affect your relationship” thing, the “I’m a working woman, how will this affect me” thing… and what do we get instead?  For NINETY MINUTES we get this instead:

“Hey, HB, I need to tell you something.”

“Sure, Liz, what’s up?”

*explosion, distraction*

“Oh, Liz, did you have something to tell me?”

“Yea, I--"

*explosion, distraction*

Taking ninety minutes to tell the title character something I’ve been told in the audience… this is not a good plan.  And when they DO tell him, it doesn’t really DO anything.  It’s sloppy.  Just like Liz knowing at the very end of the movie that she’s having twins.  HOW DOES SHE KNOW THIS!?  There are loads of unresolved, unexplained bullshit-- all of it set to bad music.  The bad guy talks about uniting his elf people for war.  We see his elf people at the council of suck.  And then… no more elf people.  Apparently, this royal elf is basically the prince of a machine army and nobody else.  I don’t understand this.

There’s so much wrong with this movie.  I mean, sure, I laughed some.  And yes, it’s nice to see a movie do effects that aren’t all CGI.  But I can’t like it.  Maybe someday, somehow I’ll get dumber.  But for now I just can’t grasp what the hell Del Toro is thinking other than that he wanted to make puppets.  Some people are really harsh on “Blade II”, and I understand why.  It’s a little disjointed.  Something about it doesn’t quite flow right.  It needs a couple more character moments, a few more breathers, and needs to try a little bit less to be cool.  But ya know what?  The basic plot of that movie is a few small shifts away from identical to this… and it was far and away better.  Because we see Blade and his crew experience some stuff.  Feelings happen.  Choices are made.  As it stands, I'm not looking forward to "The Hobbit", but then again, I was only fully devoted to the first "Lord of the Rings" movie, and more dedicated to screaming in rage throughout the second film.

“Hellboy II” happens.  And it doesn’t make sense.  I don’t understand why the previously human-run BPRD sends in someone new from DC to command its main office who is definitely in the “freak” category.  I don’t understand how any of the relationship struggles “resolve”.  I really, really don’t understand what the hell ANYONE was thinking in dismissing Marco Beltrami and his brilliant, quirky theme from the last film for an unceasing assault of Danny Elfman giving us his very worst. 

But most of all, I do not understand the telegraphed pass.

There we are, the defense, the audience.  Maybe you don’t have all the expectations I do.  You haven’t seen this offense before, you don’t know its moves.  But within the movie itself we are told at the very beginning “there is an army, and you can challenge the leader of the army… hey, are you listening, Hellboy?”  Hey, did anyone notice the fact that the bad guy has a twin with a physical wounding bond?  So… like, if you hurt one, the other would go down!  So, we know what’s coming.  We know what the third act is.  And that’s fine.  That’s more than fine, that’s great.  Because at the end of the movie, you SHOULD know what has to happen.  John McClane is gonna have to blow up the bad guy.  Neo is gonna end up being the One.  The great movies know this.  But when you telegraph a pass, you HAVE to do one of two things:

1) Fake us out.

Or

2) Throw that pass while doing a backflip to a receiver who just barely gets their feet in-bounds before scoring. 

Don’t do these things, and your audience gets BORED.  I WANTED the movie to end.  I did NOT feel the need to keep sitting there.  As filmmakers you either have to hit us in a way we aren’t looking for, or you have to make what we knew was coming so out-of-this-world amazing that we want to hit the instant replay because it was just THAT GOOD.  Anyone out there remember that title game in football between Texas and USC?  And near the end, you see that Vince Young is gonna run the ball himself.  And you knew it was coming.  You knew he was gonna do it.  But the way, and the confidence, and the finesse is just so amazing that you wanna re-watch it.  Yea, Hellboy doesn’t end like that.

It just ends.