HELLBOY

In 1944, the Nazi sorcerer Grigori Rasputin opens a passage to another dimension with the intention of invoking a demonic figure that would lead humanity towards a holocaust. The ritual is, however, interrupted by American soldiers, who prevent Rasputin's mad plan and manage to kill the sorcerer and his assistants. Yet, something has managed to pass from the other dimension: it is a baby demon, a kind of red monkey with a stone arm. Dr. Broom decides to keep the demon, who shows himself very friendly from the beginning, and raise him as a son, naming him Hellboy. Sixty years later, we find Hellboy, now grown up, as the leader of a group of secret agents operating for the American government within the Department of Paranormal Research and Defense. Rasputin is regularly invoked by his Nazi servants made immortal by their master and returns to sow panic in the streets of New York, determined to carry out his plan of destruction. After the mutant vampires of "Blade II", the talented Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro decides to tackle another comic-book movie, but this time he starts from the beginning and gives cinematic origins to "Hellboy", a fantasy-horror comic born from the pencil of Mike Mignola in 1993. Since Del Toro has always declared himself a die-hard fan of Mignola's character, he asked the character's creator himself to supervise the entire project to get a cinematic version that would not disappoint the readers of the comic. And so it was. Although the cinematic Hellboy presents several variations from its paper counterpart (also because the comics of this saga are not easily "filmable"), it still manages to keep intact the grotesque and genuinely rowdy spirit of the original. Del Toro has talent to spare and manages to create an excellent film with material that in other hands would have only given rise to an anonymous pile of explosions and ridiculous computer graphics. Instead, the Mexican director manages to create a perfect mix of genres capable of moving and entertaining the viewer as rarely happens for films of this kind. "Hellboy" has in itself the bases of fantastic cinema contaminated with suggestions typical of Lovecraftian horror, to which is added a fast-paced action movie rhythm and a measured ironic component given mainly by the bizarre characterizations of the main characters. It is precisely the characters who populate the universe of "Hellboy" that give this film a strong appeal. The little red devil, played by the magnificent Ron Perlman (an actor with an incredible physique du role), is a likable "man of action" who loves Baby Ruth chocolate bars, eats like an army, and has a soft spot for cats and Cuban cigars. Hellboy, Red for friends, is a grotesque and monstrous being, but his education has made him conceptually adapt to humans, and that is why he tries to hide his diabolical features by filing down the huge horns he has on his forehead. But Hellboy is for New Yorkers a sort of urban legend, a mythical creature said to roam the city's streets at night, a lawful paladin who cannot have the celebrity of his superhero cousins, due to the secrecy of the government department for which he works. An invisible hero, therefore, eager for visibility but unable to have it really. Our Red is accompanied by a series of singular supporting characters ranging from the intelligent sensitive frog-man Abe Sapien (a heavily made-up Doug Jones) to the problematic fire girl Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), whom Hellboy is in love with but not reciprocated. The team is completed by Dr. Broom, played by the always good John Hurt, paternal figure and mentor of the protagonist, and by John Myers (Rupert Evans), an original character created for the occasion of the film and tasked with acting as "babysitter" to the undisciplined Hellboy. The villains, unfortunately, are not very developed, and the only one who really comes out in a glorious way is Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (played by Ladislav Beran), a faithful servant of Rasputin, a sadomasochistic Nazi expert in martial arts, and whose body is composed of mechanical extensions due to self-inflicted mutilations. The film is rich in rhythm, and the direction is constantly seeking visual and acrobatic experiments. The photography of the excellent Guillermo Navarro gives a dark tone to the entire story, and the special effects, almost entirely realized in the old style, are of the highest level. In short, "Hellboy" is a real spectacle, a film that entertains with intelligence, an anti-blockbuster without time that comes to enrich the already excellent gallery of freaks in celluloid that Del Toro is slowly building.