“Hellboy” is not an ambitious film, and that makes it difficult to apply the forensic knife. It’s like cutting tapioca. The film is content to get by on the charms of the lead characters, especially Ron Perlman’s Hellboy. The plot is the standard end-of-the-world scenario, the plot that SF, horror or comic-book movies use when they can’t think of anything better to do. The nigh-indestructible bad guys kill some guards and steal an ancient artifact, the hero is shown to be a morose loner, the mentor is killed, and I’m getting bored even trying to follow this rut. What can be done? You can make a perfectly good film that follows many or most of these conventions – the Spider-man films, in particular, are done with enough passion to make them enjoyable – but doing so, and staying with the overall plot, requires lots of small changes and is a pain to do. Tapioca.

First of all, we’re give two introductory sequences: Hellboy’s birth, and Rasputin’s resurrection. The second is only necessary because Rasputin was killed in the first sequence, and we need some way of explaining why he hasn’t done much in the last sixty years. It’s awkward. It would be better to omit the second sequence altogether: instead, either have Ilsa channeling or somehow linked to Rasputin, and/or have him not coming back until the last moments of the film, when the gates of hell have been reopened. He doesn’t do much anyway, really. Ilsa could stand-in perfectly well (and in the scene where Selma Blair’s firestarter character (Liz Sherman) goes flame-o-ramic in the asylum, having her there instead of Rasputin would be a lot… well, hotter. Sorry).

Which brings us to our real problem: the bad guys aren’t particularly memorable. The Cthulhoid monster thingies – “Sammael” - get much more screen time, and even they aren’t particularly good – after a great build-up in which we’re shown they are plague carriers, immortal and spread their eggs a lot, they end up all congregated in a single room so that Sherman can incinerate the lot of them. And, for some reason, they don’t regenerate after that one. Go figure.

Our first big lot of work, then, is in making the baddies better. For Sammael, it means carrying through with the threats of the ancient scriptures describing them. The first Sammael goes through a big crowd and a packed train. Let’s have at least a couple of people suffering a nasty plague – perhaps they’re scratched, touched, or breathe in something. Later, we can ratchet up the peril to the (non-Hellboy) good guys from having the Sammael trying to scratch, touch or breathe on them. The regeneration/resurrection/duplication thing presents more serious difficulties: there is an implied threat that these things could over-run the entire Earth if you kept killing them. Who needs to summon the elder gods if these guys are going to do it anyway? There has to be a clever but subtle weakness to the resurrection: something akin to the old “can be killed by no Man” trick. We could have the main characters recognize the duplication thing early on – in fact, the bad guys could demonstrate it by chopping their summoned monster immediately in half – and try various increasingly desperate ways of dealing with it as they go along. Confining a corpse to a sealed canister, only to have dozens of them exploding out of it, as each new pair die and duplicate. Perhaps the trick could be as simple as destroying yet another artifact that is the source of their power, or as complex as doing the incinerate thing, gathering up the new-born nasties, and tossing them into the mouth of an elder god as it gets sucked back into the hell dimension from whence it, y’know, came. My favorite, though, is that the monsters should be after something or someone. It makes most sense that they’d be after whatever killed their parent – that their first task would be to avenge themselves. Makes sense, right? Picture the scene at the end, but this time, the Sammael resurrect from Sherman’s big fireball - and they all come after her. She throws herself into the maw of an elder god, all the Sammael swarm in after her, and the gate closes taking the whole mess with it. Tragic/heroic, n’est pas? Prefer a happy ending? We don’t even need the gate at that point: once the elder god starts killing the monsters, it’s Evil God A (the Big ‘un) vs. Evil God B. (the Swarm of Sammael) and all our heroes have to do is get out of the way (and Hellboy to get between everything and Sherman).

Let’s try and give Ilsa & Kroenen (the clockwork guy) a bit of a makeover. Rasputin hasn’t come back yet: we’re saving that for the finale. Perhaps Kroenen is in love with Ilsa. He doesn’t even have to say anything: just his lurking presence, creeping her out even as she finds him useful, would make them more interesting. Perhaps Ilsa is questioning her love for Rasputin – there’s been a sixty-year period since they last talked. But now Kroenen is looking at her all the time, and Rasputin is talking to her via the videos she records when she’s being possessed by him, and sure, she wants him back, but there’s also the motive to get him out of her head and stop giving her nosebleeds, and to have him around to stop Kroenen when he finally slips a gear…

Ilsa & Kroenen need to have a somewhat clearer plan. Let’s try and stay with the main theme. They want Hellboy to become bad and open the gate. The Story is about what Hellboy will choose: Nature, or Nurture. So what’s all that malarkey about the Sammael? Why not just kidnap Sherman and either kill her, or threaten to; just like we see right at the end anyway?

So, let’s make Rasputin the reason they’re trying to open the gate: by now he is an Elder God, and he needs Hellboy to let him back into the world, therein to wreak havoc. The Sammael is all about resurrection and regeneration, isn’t it? Perhaps it was “accidentally” released in an earlier attempt to bring Rasputin back. Perhaps Rasputin himself was responsible for the death of the very first of these creatures, a fact we only discover right at the end, as they swarm over him. Thus, y’know, closure with both the monsters and him.

There are many routes for Ilsa and Kroenen to follow. Traditional ones would have Ilsa abandoned by Rasputin when he no longer needs her, and for her dying act (or Kroenen’s dying act) to be one that ruins him in turn; for Ilsa to be a sacrifice to bring Rasputin back, at the hands of Kroenen; or, for the good guys to kill Ilsa and get Rasputin and Kroenen really, really mad. I’d be more interested in an ending in which Kroenen tries to kill Rasputin, is killed by Ilsa (she’s a badass!) before he can do it, and Rasputin (who, remember, is a hideous big monster) absorbs Ilsa and becomes half-Rasputin and Ilsa. Then, they get destroyed together.

That’s the bad guys. The good guys aren’t as difficult, because they were pretty much what went right with the film, with the exception of the wishy-washy FBI guy (John Myers), the exposition target and audience identification figure. Such characters often have muted personalities so that they don’t compete with the hero. In this case, though, his personality was too muted. We never get any evidence for why he was hand-picked to help Hellboy. Although we see his journey from put-upon journeyman to respected team member, Hellboy’s nod of grudging respect to him comes in response to a certain dogged persistence and some fairly standard gunplay. We are supposed to assume that Hellboy has seen into Myers’s heart and seen something pure, but it should be a bigger moment, and based on something less standard-training. If we are to base this attribute on his supposed purity (which they never do anything with – I was almost expecting a virgin sacrifice thing to happen) it could be as simple as the ability to make quick moral judgements. There is something of a theme that Myers is Hellboy’s minder. If he has been ordered to protect Hellboy no matter what, we could have a moment in which Hellboy is in peril but innocents are in peril too, and Myers immediately turns to save the innocents. And kittens. That’d get ‘em bonding.

Next, we have the problem that he doesn’t have a great deal to do. He gets infatuated with Sherman, provoking Hellboy’s jealousy. He meanders around, having things explained to him. At the end, he knocks Ilsa on the head and throws a crucifix at Hellboy. You feel as though the romance angle was supposed to go further: that Hellboy’s jealousy was intended to be the factor that made him give up and allow open the gate to the elder gods. It would be intriguing if this had somehow been set up by Rasputin: perhaps he was responsible for Myers being sent to help Hellboy, knowing that Sherman would fall for him (having, perhaps, had a similar romantic attachment in her past) and he for her. It’s a low-risk setup for Rasputin, with potentially strong rewards, and would add dramatic tension when the characters find this out. Hellboy, and the audience could wander: Is Myers a plant? Or has he introduced other weaknesses Rasputin is counting on? Myers, similarly conflicted, could leave - and then be brought back into the fold by Hellboy, who judges that Rasputin made a mistake. In the finale, he could be given the detective role of figuring out what is really happening with the Egyptian monsters, perhaps just after Sherman has incinerated all the monsters.

I haven’t covered the role of Abe Sapien (who was mostly fine, though rather under-used) or the head of the organisation, Tom Manning, who after making peace with Hellboy, is abandoned until the credits sequence. It was good, and very surprising, seeing him not being killed off. Both he and Abe are rather annoyingly sidelined for the finale. They could have been out of the main action but still in peril from the Sammael, saved at the last minute by the climactic destruction of Rasputin.

Lastly we come to Hellboy. I liked the performance and the character. It would have been nicer to see him more conflicted about being a human or a demon in the finale – Rasputin was supposed to have engineered him into an accepting state. If the romance angle between Sherman and Myers had gone further, this might have been more justified. I wasn’t quite convinced by the gate being half-opened, the elder gods coming through, Hellboy changing his mind, and then the elder gods going back. You’d have thought if they had their tentacles waving over the Earth, it would be a bit too late to unsummon them. By having Rasputin coming through instead, we don’t have to do the unsummoning. Instead, Hellboy has to live with his mistake, and come up with a way of undoing it the hard way, reintroducing Rasputin to the Egyptian monsters.

To me, that would be a more satisfying, logical conclusion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2004 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Action, Comic Book, H, Horror, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.