Thursday, November 24, 2005

Hellboy


I watched Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy just last night and was mildly disappointed. I haven't yet read Mike Mignola's comic and can't compare, but this wasn't just original enough. It looked just like another film from Blade to Captain Sky. The plot line should've been tighter and focused more around the Seven Gods of Chaos (and they should've attacked the Earth! I would've loved to see Hellboy to kick their asses!).

The biggest problem, however, was that they had saved money in the wrongest possible place: the actors were almost uniformly bad. Ron Perlman was OK in the lead, but John Hurt was a bit lame all the time and all the others came out of straight-to-video grade stuff. (Especially Rasputin, who should've revelled gleefully in evil and sin, was just another baldhead. I could've done his part just as well. His partner-in-crime looked great, but was no actor.)

It's too bad for del Toro. I really liked Cronos and Mimic (though I should've seen that one again) and his film about Spanish civil war, The Devil's Backbone, is very stylish and full of spooky atmosphere. (The last five or ten minutes are a let-down, though.) I understand he's doing Lovecraft's "Mountains of Madness", hope he gets something more original this time done.

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