Hellboy (David Harbor, Sheriff Jim Hopper from Stranger Things) is a big and sulky big man with a red face (not because he drinks) and horns (not because his wife cheated on him), which he constantly files to keep from growing into mugs … Because Hellboy or, in Russian, “Devil” is really the devil himself from the underworld. But, oddly enough, not evil, but quite good-natured, somewhere in the depths, behind a stern face. Hellboy is a brute brute who fights other fabulous and mythical monsters in the Bureau of Defense Against Paranormal Threats, which is headed by his adoptive father, avaricious professor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane, One of the “American Gods” and Blackbeard from “Pirates of the Caribbean IV During the war, he witnessed the occult ritual “Annanerbe” and Grigory Rasputin, when the Nazis were looking for any, even the most insane, ways to win in World War II. But English saboteurs intervened, the end of the world did not happen, and a young demon hunter found a materialized from hell, a fiery devil with a stone hand, who, despite all instructions, did not kill. And now the strange creature has grown into a hefty bull with a bad character, who does not yet know that the five-hundred-year-old beauty Vivienne Namue (Mila Jovovich, Leela from “The Fifth element “and Alice from” Resident Evil “). Once upon a time she sent a plague to Europe, but King Arthur and the wizard Mer Lin were able to defeat her by cutting the immortal sorceress into pieces, and now the boar minotaur brought her back to full life on the tip of Baba Yaga, who thirsts for personal revenge, and in the new kingdom of forgotten legends, rid of people, Hellboy is destined for the most important role … that the queen should have her own king, and that the world, which has forgotten its old masters, is a cruel and unforgiving executioner, born to decide destinies with the flaming sword of doom.
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“Hellboy “is an adaptation of the rather colorful comics of Mike Mignola, who in his own dark, bloody and spectacular manner dissects the myths of the peoples of the world, confronting Hellboy with more and more monsters in different parts of the globe. The previous two film adaptations were directed by the now Oscar-winning director, an exceptional artist. , a storyteller and adorer of monsters with a morbid imagination, the original Guillermo del Toro, who loves frightening and visually rich fairy tales with unusual characters; this is a man and a dreamer who has formed his own completely unique style, no matter what movie you take – an action story about a cool the vampire hunter Blade 2, the dark phantasmagoria about a girl from Franco’s Spanish times, The Labyrinth of the Faun, or even the graphically sparkling, all-commercial film about giant robots fighting deep-sea monsters, Pacific Rim. Guillermo del Toro explores the nature of monsters as allegory of otherness, dissimilarity and related to none loneliness and even the thirst for love – even if by the laws of nature it seems impossible, as one of his last films tells about, reminiscent of “Ichthyandra” by the wonderful science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev, the Oscar-winning drama “The Shape of Water” about a not speaking cleaning lady and a reasonable amphibian.
“Hellboy” and “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” by del Toro with excellent character actor Ron Perlman (a scowling soldier with a square grin from “Alien: Resurrection” and about the same role in “Blade 2”), as well as veteran of science fiction movie Doug Jones (the performer of the role of the Water One, once a professional dancer, has excellent plasticity and often plays in complex makeup of all kinds of monsters and aliens) did not very much resemble Mignola’s comics, rather, del Toro used heroes, villains, situations and entourage to create something of his own – at times a terrible, but at the same time a fairy tale about a reluctant hero and at the same time an outcast who has no place anywhere, because he is not like everyone else, but a danger to those whom he, despite his feigned rudeness and threatening appearance, loves and tries to protect , – pushes him forward; and no matter how many skeletons in the closet and dangerous creatures he meets on his way. Hellboy del Toro will grumble like a big child and get outraged, but will use his stone hand and a massive revolver with consecrated bullets, and even the mystery of its origin and dark destiny will not stop a stern lover of fluffy kittens and beer gatherings with an amphibian friend. The eyeless sorcerer monk from Russia, worshiping the unknown and incomprehensible Lafkraftian evil, and the pale prince of the secret circle of elves, seeking secret knowledge, which once almost gave the fairy kingdoms victory over the human world, are witnesses to this.
Unfortunately, the films were not successful enough at the box office to fully recoup their production costs, and therefore, despite all the love and desire of del Toro, Pearlman and Jones to complete the story, we never ended the story of Hellboy and his pyromancer Liz. saw. And we are unlikely to see it already, because the studios considered it cheaper, more reliable and simpler to restart the story and shoot a third film with other actors.
In contrast to the gloomy and in its own way enchanting fantasies of del Toro, released in 2019, Neil Marshall’s Hellboy is an adaptation of other comic book issues about a gloomy, hornless man from hell, and there is neither the fiery Liz nor the amphibian Abe. And the approach to portraying the main character here is a little different. Hellboy of David Harbor is a rude, unrestrained and constantly fucking uncle who doesn’t really want anything about this life, but for some reason this life bothers him and interferes with drinking and eating pizza in between the sweeps of Mexican werewolves and the protracted teenage rebellion against a father who loves the brute like a son, but does not tell much about his origin in order to protect him from the threat. The new Hellboy is weaker than the old one, but sturdier and more prosaic (so no romance, girls and cats), here Anung Un-Ram (real, “hellish” name of the hero) is a completely different character, and this is not the only difference between the new film and the old ones.
Now it is more of a thrash action movie “like in the eighties” – with a cool and biting man at the head, who shoots a lot, hits and shoots him in the neck, – and at the same time a cheap horror film in the style of the nineties, than a dark and beautiful fairy tale of the early 2000s …
And this is a big problem. The movie is tearing apart.
He has a ragged editing (you can see how the film was forcibly squeezed into a two-hour timing with such a density of events), camera work lacking stars from the sky, standard direction, good acting performances – and at the same time excellent makeup when it comes to monsters and practical effects. and special effects, monstrous by the standards of big cinema. Paradox? I will try to explain.
Hellboy stumbles where the backstory of John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing fell: the 2011 film crew spent a lot of time and energy on real animatronics, realistic stunt dolls and silicone prosthetics, but all were ruined by cheap computer effects transforming Something into frame (this is admitted by the makeup artists themselves). This is the undoubted power of practical special effects: when you see well-made and well-shot animatronics or inventive make-up on the screen, the brain is deceived and evokes the emotion that the filmmakers intended faster than when you see an image entirely or entirely generated by a computer. Therefore, rubber flesh tearing from the inside of a person and mechanical jaws, biting off the “hands” of an amputee in “Something” in 1982, or real bull’s blood and, a surprise for Sigourney Weaver’s colleagues, piercing the chest of poor John Hurt, the little Alien in 1979 still looks great and not weak frighten, in contrast to, say, a little miracle with an unwashed head named Samara, crawling out of a well on TV in the films of the Ring series, or, for example, the main antagonist of the excellent and very evil movie at the end of the movie “Live”, where astronauts on the ISS studied a sample of living matter from the Martian rock, and it has developed from a simple cell into a very intelligent and dangerous creature, interestingly invented and well rendered, but not as frightening outwardly as an Alien or or funny tricks of old Freddy Krueger.
Now you can draw anything on a computer, and that’s great, CG is an incredible tool that allows you to embody any director’s idea. Rejuvenate the actors on the screen (Samuel L. Jackson in Captain Marvel, for example, or Robert De Niro in the upcoming Netflix movie Scrosese The Irishman), return the character that the actor played for a long time (a fairly good example is the grand Moff Tarkin Peter Cushing from the movie “Star Wars: Rogue One”) or very realistically embody a creature that is either impossible to play well in heavy makeup (expressive chimpanzee with heavy eyes Caesar from the “Planet of the Apes” trilogy), or it is difficult to reliably make practical effects (the beautiful inhabitant of the jungle Pandora Neytiri from James Cameron’s “Avatar”, the canonical already goggle-eyed Gollum from “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” by Peter Jackson, or charming Alita, about whom I recently wrote).
In Neil Marshall’s Hellboy, the personal effects outsourced to Bulgaria are nowhere near as good. The gutta-percha muzzle of a walking boar never looks alive (seriously, a pig could gesture like that ?!), secondary fairy-tale creatures resemble game models (something is wrong with materials and animation), the decapitated Nemue even causes laughter and shame – any youtuber with a green screen and straight arms will do no worse. They didn’t have enough money to model and animate Mila Jovovich’s head? The harsh Korean, the jaguar man, also looks strange, almost like the last scenes of the rather stylish film “Van Helsing” with the young Hugh Jackman (maybe it’s time for filmmakers to move away from the format “one crap poorly drawn on a computer fights the other”?), Special ability The new heroine, a girl with a talent to summon the dead with the help of, um, her esophagus, also looks disgusting (technically, including) – the make-up actors stand exactly in place and hardly gesticulate, what the hell? No, the graphics specialists did a great job, they are great fellows and great specialists, at least technically. But from a major Hollywood film, which relies so much on special effects in its plot, you expect more than a three-fold version of the grafon from Andreasyan’s Defenders (as the poor director said in one of his interviews, who wanted to shoot the Russian Avengers, but who shot the mixture ” Benny Hill’s Show “, Kremlin’s fake news and “Marvel’s Avengers” parody, during difficult production there were conversations like” What did you draw for me, it’s a big rat, not a bear! “). This also applies to part of the makeup – the resurrected Merlin, for example, looked like a sleepy grandfather with crumbling plaster on his face, I’m not kidding. Was there enough money for only a couple of seconds for a scene with a character? .. Bad graphics are more striking than successful special effects, and interrupts the whole impression of the film – although it has some good ones.
Its greatest success is the image of Baba Yaga, a secondary, as it seems at first glance, character.
She is simply disgusting, – gnarled, one-eyed, with a malicious mocking grin, evoking horror by her very appearance, especially when it turns out that she, as in fairy tales, already has two “bone legs” and when she is not sitting at a table with appearances from killed children, then moves like a spider, on four limbs, bending its back back and looking downward. Creepy, good fellows! The best and creepiest character in the film – incredible makeup, infernal design and talented acting, she looks like the biggest challenge for Hellboy, such an embodiment of death and relentlessness of time. I would like to appeal to our American friends – make a separate film about a granny in a mansion on chicken legs, awesome! I would love to watch such a horror movie, fifteen minutes was not enough.
(Also, speaking of monsters, there is a rather cool moment at the end of the tape, when giant Boschian monsters emerge from the depths of hell in the center of London, dispassionately arranging a massacre simply because they can, and it looks like a very cruel version of the ending of the cartoon “Gravity Falls “,” They decided to turn our world into a rock album cover! “, Remember? Good creature design, scary and not banal for everyone, a little del Toro style. Too bad the moment ends quickly.)
What else can you say good about this film? It has a dynamic, albeit predictable, plot, heroes and villains collide in the middle of the film. Mila Jovovich is, so beautiful and feminine. It is clear that her role (the main villain, by the way) is more of a furniture and a completely formulaic character (“Oh, I am resurrected! People, die, here’s a freak for you; – oh, you are the main character here, I will seduce you and make you serve me by force and conviction, and I will also punish everyone who helped me, because I am an evil steal “), and Peppa the pig-man also turns out to be the stupidest character with the intelligence of Piglet in the plot … So everything is hellishly bad with the characters important for the story.
But on the other hand, there is music, a bit stereotyped in the orchestral part, but suitable for the heroes and the atmosphere, and also perfectly mixed with hybrid rock, sometimes breaking into dubstep (although who generally listens to dubstep now?): It turns out an excellent mixture, quite adequate and vigorous album (especially separately about the film). It seems that this is a small trend towards experimenting with music: in the unexpectedly awarded “Oscar” for music, Marvel’s film “Black Panther” was based not only on traditional African tunes, but also on the motives of the trap style (fashionable chirping beat).
The adult rating of the film can also be recorded as an asset: while most of the big American films aimed at adolescents are the most puritanical in their approach to depicting blood, violence, swearing and nudity (there is a whole story with the MPAA, in the 70s and 80s films were less restrained ), “Hellboy” is not shy about “meat” and unpleasant scenes. Which quite often (but not always) goes sideways for him: the act of tin looks either cheaply made, or sickening, or not entirely appropriate, which is a bit strange for a hooligan thriller based on comics with an element of horror. There will be a clear “bad movie” effect straight on TV-3 or REN-TV with their crazy programs about aliens who built pyramids and helped Hitler.
To summarize, a very controversial film is coming out for a mass audience, which, to put it mildly, I cannot recommend. It can be seen that the team tried very hard to make something distinctive and not similar to previous films (while keeping within not two hundred million, but less, because you need to eat something, and nobody wanted the third box office failure in the series) , but they were let down by history, limited budget and, possibly, creative differences within the team, as well as the very decision of the studio to hack at the root of the ending of Del Toro’s story. In terms of the sum of its components, this film did not come out of the word at all, I hardly watched it in two passes. But if he has a continuation, then, of course, we wish him good luck, maybe the second time it will turn out better. Moreover, someone quite liked the film, and an interesting fantasy with playing on religious themes like “Hellboy” or “Constantine” with Keanu Reeves (the film was cool in its own way) does not happen too much, something must save us from the judgment of the Lord.
But wait, I know what could have saved our souls even more guaranteed than a bad movie about a good demon in a world without the forces of light. The Second Cum-ming of “Dogma” by Kevin Smith! I am sure that for such a thing the Lord God would have forgiven everyone in advance for all sins for two thousand years ahead, so come on, Silent Bob, puff on the joint again!
P. S. I hope I will live to see the adaptation of the comics about the Battle Pope – a jock, alcoholic, womanizer and swearing man, whom the Lord chose to correct a small mistake after he flared up, arranged for ungrateful humanity Sodom and Gomorrah and opened the seal on the gates of Hell. Someone has to kill these demons, not all Jesus and Santa Claus have to rake! The tiara of the pope who knows kung fu is heavy.
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