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A bad Christmas in 1955 HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY Directed by Guillermo Del Toro Reviewed by Matthew C. Brown As has become the grist of a kind of modern-moviemaking fairy tale, Guillermo Del Toro certainly has no lack as a visualist. The man rains eyeball candy on the masses and can creature-design his way out of a paper bag (in this case besting even his own superlative Pan's Labyrinth concoctions with the introduction of Wink, a heavy who moves like an upright rhinocerous, and the Angel of Death herself, who out-freakies the Pale Man in the where-do-I-put-my-eyeballs game). In the A-list of 21st century fantasy filmmaking, this guy's the current gold standard. His movies don't just look good; they look good and stain your eyeballs for years.
What, then, of the story? For all his prodigous gifts with the look n' feel, Del Toro has always suffered from recurring skill gaps in his writing: an over-reliance on form; a lack of substance in his English-language dialogue; a tendency to see hererosocial relations from only the male point of view; and what's with all the clocks? His last feature, Pan's Labyrinth, at long last sealed over the old holes with a moral fable that shook the bones of the collective unconscious while satisfying the eyes of everyone who thinks the last great fantasy film was The Dark Crystal in 1982. Pan's seemed to herald the completion of a successful leap upward from the young director of able adventure stories like Blade II and even the first Hellboy. With Hellboy II, sadly, all of Del Toro's weaknesses as a writer have come roaring back, and have brought some friends. The thing looks fantastic, but goddamn, this is some piss-poor storytelling. Everything you need to know about the trouble Del Toro is in becomes apparent in the first three minutes of the film, where a preadolescent Hellboy (ugh...) is told a Christmas Eve bedtime story by Trevor "Broom" Bruttenholm. Anyone who fondly remembers Boy Hellboy's life-changing comic-book encounter with a stack of pancakes is going to be sorely disappointed, as this sequence is little more than a sentimental opportunity to include John Hurt in the sequel proceedings, an impulse which should have been resisted. Faced with a small quantity of exposition to get out of the way in order to set up the principal conflict of his film - a crackerjack idea wherein the repressed mythological masses being thumbed under by omnipresent mankind have had enough, and decide to fight back - Del Toro goes with the most painful available cliché, and has the actor in his ensemble with the nicest voice read the exposition aloud to the audience. It's the kind of screenwriting decision that comes of thinking that The Lady in the Water was unjustifiably excoriated. (The Lady refs are oddly abundant. Shadow-puppet stick figures act out the millennia-old battle between mankind and the Golden Army, and Danny Elfman's score pillages liberally from Howard's throughout.) It's lazy storytelling, front and center, and it's endemic throughout the film; for every clever narrative idea in Hellboy II, there are three instances where Del Toro indulges in utter hackdom, avoiding the niceties of engineering a workable story in favour of just keeping the gears lubricated so that more and more awesome shit can be piled onto his screen. Sure, the guy with the cathedral on his head is cool - but what's he there for? Just to hand off a map? If the answer to every threshold guardian in the entire narrative is just to have Hellboy hit them really hard, why doesn't he just do that to begin with, instead of waddling through a couple of minutes of head-scratching first? By the third act we're ready to scream, "Of course she hid the crown in the poetry book - it's the only book any character has touched in the entire goddamn movie." Perhaps this would not rankle so much - we are, of course, living in a world of gross archetype here - if a bit more had been done with the characters. Hellboy 1 suffered its share of script problems, too, but what carried it through to the upper half of comic book adaptations was the fact that for all the dude-with-a-red-face-and-tail razzle-dazzle, it had one of the most touchingly human protagonists ever to grace a comic book movie. Where is he this time? Hellboy is a fucking dick on his second kick at the can, and not in the House sort of way where you love the prickly curmudgeon anyway. He's a shithead to his friends, a shithead to his bosses, and a shithead to his girlfriend. Everyone comes away weakened just for putting up with him, none more so than Liz (Selma Blair), who falls head-first into every bit of female-lead misogyny that has ever been shoveled into a "dick flick." Transitioning from harping shrew who won't let Hellboy leave his underwear in the sink, to nagging leech who belittles him on the job, to rejuvenating Madonna figure who loves him anyway without having to have that love earned (and will even, someday, bear him many pink children), the unstable tube of gunpowder of film 1 is gone. Selma Blair has said she would do anything for Guilermo Del Toro; it's time for her to reassess that declaration. Given his own voice this time out, the only member of the BPRD team who actually comes through with some kind of a decent performance in spite of his writing is Doug Jones as Abe Sapien. Most of the off-action dialogue scenes in the film are atrociously thin, with the exception of a rather engaging five minutes where Abe and HB get roarin' drunk and complain about girls. (I could have done with more useful subject matter, but a spade's a spade.) Fan-fave Johann Krauss gets dropped into the proceedings, complete with a bombastic Seth MacFarlane voice persona, but aside from kicking Hellboy's ass at a sorely-needed point in the film, he only really serves to shove Jeffrey Tambor into second-banana status, which is wasteful. Tambor could have done plenty more for the story than he's allowed to do here. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is only the principal villain - Luke Goss as the zealous Prince Nuada - who is operating at the level to which Del Toro is aspiring with his entire film. In Goss, we can actually see the shimmer of what Hellboy II could have been, if everyone involved had taken it more seriously - another year of development time, a lot less reliance on the creature effects to carry the story, etc. Goss reaches a level of soulfulness that suggests a story with depth - the devil's choice (no pun intended) that Hellboy is daily faced with, as a creature (immigrant?) caught between two worlds/cultures; and the growing entropy that overtakes all worlds when we've simply run out of space on the planet for separate, unique things to thrive on their own. There's a lengthy sequence right in the middle of the film, where Nuada unleashes an "Elemental" - a living tree/god mixed with the inevitable tentacle-creature that is part and parcel of a Hellboy story - in a downtown environment which incorporates an underground monster market, an above-ground flock of human civilians, our BPRD protagonists, and perhaps importantly, at least one helpless baby. It's the hinge point of the film, and if Danny Elfman didn't pummel the fucking thing to death with his ludicrously overblown score, it would actually be the one 5-minute chunk of the film which undeniably works on almost every level. Hellboy is dangling from a building with the baby in his arm and a very large gun that can kill the creature, Nuada is standing above him intoning the subtexts of the choice our hero must now make, and the creature is just, well, freaking out. Hellboy shoots the tree god - and it's a choice as muddy and dimensional as any we make in life. For a fleeting second, the impetus of the story and the payoff of Del Toro's visuals meet in the middle. Sadly, the moment of artistic synergy doesn't last long. The next sequence has Hellboy musing on his outcast status while standing next to a TV playing Frankenstein. It's important to remember that we're not talking about a novel here. In the game of cinema, Del Toro has won the first half before he even walks in the door - there will be few motion pictures in 2008 (or beyond) that seem to contribute as much to the pure craft of visual storytelling, and visual imagination itself, as Hellboy II. It's gonna make a hell of a coffee table book. For me, though, this makes the consistent lack on the other half of the fence - the aggravating failure of the words - even more frustrating. Hellboy II might be half amazing, but that means it's also always going to be half-bad. |
