seriousfic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seriousfic) wrote2008-07-25 01:12 pm
seriousfic) wrote2008-07-25 01:12 pm
Entry tags:
Movie Review: Hellboy 2
Well, with all the hoopla over TDK (deserved), I suppose comics fandom has passed by Hellboy 2. I haven’t seen this bad a scheduling since The Punisher was released the same weekend as Kill Bill (a shame; Tom Jane OWNED Frank Castle the same way RDJ does Tony Stark). It’s too bad because even though it has a much smaller stature, I think HB2 is just as effective as TDK. More so, in some ways. TDK keeps tripping over its own shoes with the portrayal of the Batman himself, with the silly Goodyear suit and the awkward voice. Ron Perlman, on the other hand, breathes Hellboy. However, some overly blatant manipulation hampers the movie, keeping it from being all it could be.
The Good: Unlike a lot of sequels, Hellboy 2 doesn’t reset the romantic relationship so that the couple that got together in the first movie is now “estranged” and has to “reunite”. That’s fucking cheap. Instead, Hellboy and Liz are married (!!!) and moving onto new issues. “I would die for her,” Hellboy says at one point, “but she wants me to do the dishes.”
The Bad: Hellboy does get a bit of a reset in that after his maturing in Hellboy, he’s back to hating Manning and obliviously letting his norm teammates get killed.
The Weird: Agent Myers is gone, reassigned to Antarctica by way of throwaway line. I hope he’s happy there. Probably should’ve saved that for Fandom Secrets. But with his and Brom’s absence, the movie really has no positive human characters, which takes it to a pretty weird place later.
Some More Good: Even though, as I mentioned, Luke Goss’s Prince Nuada is basically Nomak with hair (right down to the same patricidal triangle), he’s for the most part a compelling anti-hero.
But: He’s more hero than anti, which is another point of all-too-blatant manipulation. As presented, his character really has no choice but to kill all humans, with the only alternative presented to him (by jerks, usually) being to let his people die out. Ummm… yeah? Couldn’t Nuala pull the old “give humanity a chance, they’re still young and learning”? But his jerkass status isn’t really confirmed until the otherwise stunning forest god sequence, where he sends that giant tentacle monster from the trailers to kill Hellboy, then chides Big Red for shooting it. Uh, Supervillain Formerly Known As Prince? Hellboy isn’t the one who used your precious forest god as a fire-and-forget missile. (Proving that there’s no stronger desire than the want to edit someone else’s draft, I think the sequence would go down much better if the forest god was something Nuada had to use to make his escape).
And maybe a scene delving into his fanaticism would’ve helped sell him, rather than just showing him sneering at a billboard. I mean, if we have time for that ugly-ass Kid Hellboy, we have time to give the Big Bad some Big Backstory, don’t we? It’s a shame, because he has the potential to be compelling in a way the Nazi assassins and Cthulu-worshipping necromancers of the first film weren’t.
And moreover: Nuala totally gets fridged, and not even in the unexpected way. Pop quiz: Two characters, one good, one bad, are connected so that if one is hurt, so is the other. How is this resolved?
A. The good character says he would rather kill them both than allow the bad character to triumph, stopping the bad guy.
B. The bad character kills himself and takes out the good guy as a final FU.
C. The good character sacrifices himself to kill the bad character.
D. A subplot revolves around breaking the bond so that the bad guy or good guy can be safely neutralized.
If you guessed C, congratulations on seeing a movie before. Even worse, it comes about as part of the old “hero lets the bad guy live, then the bad guy pulls a weapon and tries to sneak-attack the good guy”. Seriously now. Does my calendar read 1985? Am I listening to Joan Jett? I just wish they’d subverted the trope, at least a little. Maybe Nuala threatens to kill herself and Nuada surrenders because he cares for her too much to let her die. Yes, I want a summer action movie where the villain isn’t killed at the end. With the crown melted down, he wouldn’t be much of a threat anyway.
After the first movie prepped us for kitten-loving demons that shared cookies and romantic advice with fanboy kids while following crushes, Hellboy 2 doesn’t rest on its laurels, but expands upon the original with an entire underworld of fey folk. My favorite gag is a brief aside while Manning and Abe Sapien are walking through the BPRD. Upon seeing a roaring monster, Manning asks what’s going on.
“Oh, it’s Friday,” Abe answers off-handedly.
From there, the wonder and creature-feature fantasy sadly missing from the Star Wars prequels keeps coming, with a trip to The Marketplace Where The Wild Things Are that serves as spiritual successor to the cantina scene from Star Wars. As I said, the highlight is the forest god sequence, where everything very nearly meshes. Guillermo del Toro endows a big bunch of pixels with majesty and imagination, so that you fully understand Hellboy’s puzzlement at having to put down such a beautiful, terrifying force of nature. With its death, the god’s corpse becomes a forest. And even if the aah-aah music and wondrous statements of “It’s beautiful” are a touch too on-the-nose, what follows is movie magic.
In grim counterpoint to the scene in the first movie where Hellboy was thanked for rescuing a box of kittens and we finally got to see what he was fighting for, a woman demands to know what he did to her baby. Hellboy, whose desire for acceptance from Liz has grown to think he’s entitled to fame and fortune, watches as his adoring public turns on him. Some asshole throws a rock, dealing him the only injury he’s taken in the entire action sequence. And Liz, who hates being stared at, who’s the only one in the team that can be seen as normal, stands in front of him and bursts into flames. She’s a freak too. “Let’s go home,” Hellboy says. After thinking Myers and Liz had way more chemistry than the stalkeriffic Hellboy/Liz in the first movie, this moment sells me on their relationship in a way that all the speechifying declarations of love and big kisses couldn’t quite manage (in fact, given the place their relationship has ended up at, Hellboy and Liz are weirdly chaste throughout).
It’s beautiful, and even though the freaks versus mundanes theme has been amply covered by the X-Men movies, it has more punch coming from Ron Perlman with a face he wishes he could do something about then it does coming from a bunch of male models and women who could go undercover at a Maxim photoshoot with no one the wiser.
Which brings us to the ending. It does subvert expectations, but not in a satisfying way, for me at least. Hellboy and his pals, in a fit of disgust at the human world, quit the BRPD and settle down to raise kids. So in the end, they agree with Nuada’s philosophy: humans aren’t worth fighting for. So what if the BPRD has saved the world twice (that we know of); Hellboy didn’t get a parade thrown in his honor, so screw ‘em. It’s the same weird feeling you’d get if Spider-Man 2 had ended with Peter Parker having given up being Spider-Man and taken up with Mary-Jane. Even if Doc Ock was in jail, who’s going to fight the Sandman in the next movie? Maybe if they’d established that there are other people that can handle supernatural threats (given Johann Krauss’s refreshingly secret origin-less appearance, this could be a given. But the human agents are such goobers that…) and that Hellboy is continuing to work for the BPRD more out of self-esteem issues than responsibility, it would’ve gone down easier. As is, it makes the happy ending surprisingly bleak… you just know Hellboy’s going to be dragged back to work for the BPRD, and you wonder what the punishment will be for leaving it.
As a sidenote, this movie is slashy as hell. Hellboy and Abe sing a love song, Abe and Johann are practically love in first sight, and there's 'cestiness. You know, if you're into that. I'm not judging you. Except silently.
The Good: Unlike a lot of sequels, Hellboy 2 doesn’t reset the romantic relationship so that the couple that got together in the first movie is now “estranged” and has to “reunite”. That’s fucking cheap. Instead, Hellboy and Liz are married (!!!) and moving onto new issues. “I would die for her,” Hellboy says at one point, “but she wants me to do the dishes.”
The Bad: Hellboy does get a bit of a reset in that after his maturing in Hellboy, he’s back to hating Manning and obliviously letting his norm teammates get killed.
The Weird: Agent Myers is gone, reassigned to Antarctica by way of throwaway line. I hope he’s happy there. Probably should’ve saved that for Fandom Secrets. But with his and Brom’s absence, the movie really has no positive human characters, which takes it to a pretty weird place later.
Some More Good: Even though, as I mentioned, Luke Goss’s Prince Nuada is basically Nomak with hair (right down to the same patricidal triangle), he’s for the most part a compelling anti-hero.
But: He’s more hero than anti, which is another point of all-too-blatant manipulation. As presented, his character really has no choice but to kill all humans, with the only alternative presented to him (by jerks, usually) being to let his people die out. Ummm… yeah? Couldn’t Nuala pull the old “give humanity a chance, they’re still young and learning”? But his jerkass status isn’t really confirmed until the otherwise stunning forest god sequence, where he sends that giant tentacle monster from the trailers to kill Hellboy, then chides Big Red for shooting it. Uh, Supervillain Formerly Known As Prince? Hellboy isn’t the one who used your precious forest god as a fire-and-forget missile. (Proving that there’s no stronger desire than the want to edit someone else’s draft, I think the sequence would go down much better if the forest god was something Nuada had to use to make his escape).
And maybe a scene delving into his fanaticism would’ve helped sell him, rather than just showing him sneering at a billboard. I mean, if we have time for that ugly-ass Kid Hellboy, we have time to give the Big Bad some Big Backstory, don’t we? It’s a shame, because he has the potential to be compelling in a way the Nazi assassins and Cthulu-worshipping necromancers of the first film weren’t.
And moreover: Nuala totally gets fridged, and not even in the unexpected way. Pop quiz: Two characters, one good, one bad, are connected so that if one is hurt, so is the other. How is this resolved?
A. The good character says he would rather kill them both than allow the bad character to triumph, stopping the bad guy.
B. The bad character kills himself and takes out the good guy as a final FU.
C. The good character sacrifices himself to kill the bad character.
D. A subplot revolves around breaking the bond so that the bad guy or good guy can be safely neutralized.
If you guessed C, congratulations on seeing a movie before. Even worse, it comes about as part of the old “hero lets the bad guy live, then the bad guy pulls a weapon and tries to sneak-attack the good guy”. Seriously now. Does my calendar read 1985? Am I listening to Joan Jett? I just wish they’d subverted the trope, at least a little. Maybe Nuala threatens to kill herself and Nuada surrenders because he cares for her too much to let her die. Yes, I want a summer action movie where the villain isn’t killed at the end. With the crown melted down, he wouldn’t be much of a threat anyway.
After the first movie prepped us for kitten-loving demons that shared cookies and romantic advice with fanboy kids while following crushes, Hellboy 2 doesn’t rest on its laurels, but expands upon the original with an entire underworld of fey folk. My favorite gag is a brief aside while Manning and Abe Sapien are walking through the BPRD. Upon seeing a roaring monster, Manning asks what’s going on.
“Oh, it’s Friday,” Abe answers off-handedly.
From there, the wonder and creature-feature fantasy sadly missing from the Star Wars prequels keeps coming, with a trip to The Marketplace Where The Wild Things Are that serves as spiritual successor to the cantina scene from Star Wars. As I said, the highlight is the forest god sequence, where everything very nearly meshes. Guillermo del Toro endows a big bunch of pixels with majesty and imagination, so that you fully understand Hellboy’s puzzlement at having to put down such a beautiful, terrifying force of nature. With its death, the god’s corpse becomes a forest. And even if the aah-aah music and wondrous statements of “It’s beautiful” are a touch too on-the-nose, what follows is movie magic.
In grim counterpoint to the scene in the first movie where Hellboy was thanked for rescuing a box of kittens and we finally got to see what he was fighting for, a woman demands to know what he did to her baby. Hellboy, whose desire for acceptance from Liz has grown to think he’s entitled to fame and fortune, watches as his adoring public turns on him. Some asshole throws a rock, dealing him the only injury he’s taken in the entire action sequence. And Liz, who hates being stared at, who’s the only one in the team that can be seen as normal, stands in front of him and bursts into flames. She’s a freak too. “Let’s go home,” Hellboy says. After thinking Myers and Liz had way more chemistry than the stalkeriffic Hellboy/Liz in the first movie, this moment sells me on their relationship in a way that all the speechifying declarations of love and big kisses couldn’t quite manage (in fact, given the place their relationship has ended up at, Hellboy and Liz are weirdly chaste throughout).
It’s beautiful, and even though the freaks versus mundanes theme has been amply covered by the X-Men movies, it has more punch coming from Ron Perlman with a face he wishes he could do something about then it does coming from a bunch of male models and women who could go undercover at a Maxim photoshoot with no one the wiser.
Which brings us to the ending. It does subvert expectations, but not in a satisfying way, for me at least. Hellboy and his pals, in a fit of disgust at the human world, quit the BRPD and settle down to raise kids. So in the end, they agree with Nuada’s philosophy: humans aren’t worth fighting for. So what if the BPRD has saved the world twice (that we know of); Hellboy didn’t get a parade thrown in his honor, so screw ‘em. It’s the same weird feeling you’d get if Spider-Man 2 had ended with Peter Parker having given up being Spider-Man and taken up with Mary-Jane. Even if Doc Ock was in jail, who’s going to fight the Sandman in the next movie? Maybe if they’d established that there are other people that can handle supernatural threats (given Johann Krauss’s refreshingly secret origin-less appearance, this could be a given. But the human agents are such goobers that…) and that Hellboy is continuing to work for the BPRD more out of self-esteem issues than responsibility, it would’ve gone down easier. As is, it makes the happy ending surprisingly bleak… you just know Hellboy’s going to be dragged back to work for the BPRD, and you wonder what the punishment will be for leaving it.
As a sidenote, this movie is slashy as hell. Hellboy and Abe sing a love song, Abe and Johann are practically love in first sight, and there's 'cestiness. You know, if you're into that. I'm not judging you. Except silently.