Hellboy

365 Films

Entry #140

Hellboy (2004)

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro

Continuing the unofficial Guillermo Del Toro retrospective in honor of his new release, Pacific Rim, we come to might be the only example of a comic book passion project: Hellboy.  If IMDB is to be trusted as a reliable source, (and if it isn’t, then all hope is lost) Del Toro had his pick of the litter after the financial bonanza that was Blade II.  Rather than reap the benefits of any number of straight down the middle fastballs thrown his way, he chose to pursue a deeply personal, rather obscure comic book character as his next project.  That to me, is the best way to approach Hellboy and its subsequent sequel because I believe these films are as about as close as we are going to get to a full-on biological and psychological dissection of the being known as Guillermo Del Toro.  As I have made my feelings known about the current slate of comic book adaptations we are forced to endure, I shall refrain from pointing out sorely missed this quality is in essentially every other film of the sort.  Watching Hellboy for the first time, the viewer is likely to be taken aback just by the sheer oddity of it, in that, there is simply something off about the entire enterprise.  Del Toro doesn’t go for the sitcom style jokes of his peers but rather the moments before and after the joke that are so thoroughly enmeshed with his sense of character.  His dialogue may not reflect a stylized sensibility of someone like Mamet for example, but it is always unpredictable and highly precise.  If a common theme throughout Mr. Del Toro’s work is how individuals succeed or fail within larger organizational systems, than the work itself is highly reflective of a mind that is completely at ease within big budget studio efforts and smaller, more personal films.  I believe that is why I find the Hellboy movies so fascinating because they brilliantly demonstrate the unstoppable personality of Mr. Del Toro that can’t help but burst through even the blandest of expositional material.  If the original Hellboy was not a break though success (and it is my understanding that Hellboy II came about on the back and success of Pan’s Labyrinth than its predecessor), that is all the more a testament to Mr. Del Toro’s particular brand of quirk than any kind of agreed upon opinion as to the quality of the work.  And as we have seen from the recent smiting of The Lone Ranger, weird usually leads to ruin rather than financial success.  In a recent reprisal of Mr. Del Toro’s filmography by Slant Magazine (I swear, I had the idea first) the observation was made that Hellboy is, in actuality, a companion piece to Blade II.  I had never made that connection before but in revisiting the material there were certain parallels that definitely surprised me this time around.  The resurrection of Rasputin, for example, has the villain rising out of a pool of blood in a strikingly similar manner to Blade at the end of that film.  Superficial visual rhymes aside, the two films show Mr. Del Toro’s pressing obsession with how individuals overcome or succumb to their pre-ordained roles in life.  Both films feature brash, outlandish sons butting heads with more stern and seemingly unfeeling fathers and more importantly, both films show that while our day to day life might be littered with symbols, maps, and stories of our lives written ages and ages ago, our ultimate purpose will always be decided by ourselves alone.  The same could be said for Mr. Del Toro’s adventures in Hollywood.