The Bat Boy from Hell

reviewed Thu, 02 Apr 2004

Well, it’s official: I’m hopping on the government gravy train.  I’m taking a job with the EPA’s smart growth office, where I’ll be doing basically the same thing I’m doing now but, as a coworker put it, getting credit for it.  (I’m making the rounds of only-in-Washington jobs:  thinktank, trade association, feds… the only place left to go is K Street, and I don’t think I’ll be heading there anytime soon.)  As it happens, the jackass I work with is leaving, too (failing upward yet again; I’d love to hear how many people he claimed to manage and what “accomplishments” he took credit for in his interview for his new job.  I guarantee you he told them I work for him and took credit for anything I’ve written that doesn’t have my name on it), so my company is royally screwed:  they’ve just announced what a huge priority sustainable communities is, and now they have no staff in the program.  I’d feel smug about their sowing what they reaped with their poor hiring decision (I’ve found out that most people in the company, right up to the top, have come to realize that the jackass lies, claims credit for others' work, and isn’t competent to hold his job, and that I’m the only one who does any work or even knows anything about our issues, which would be nice if (a) anyone had bothered to support me over the past three years or (b) they had fired his ass) and their screwing me over (they realized how worthless he is, and yet, they not only kept him, they blocked me from getting an equivalent title and kept me at half his salary -- until I got another job offer, that is), except that the consequences fall most heavily on my boss, who’s the only person in the organization who’s ever stood up for me or cared how I was feeling.  So I’m not really as gloating as I have a right to be.

I got a free pass to Hellboy (the only circumstances under which I’d see it).  If you’re wondering why I went at all, well, I loved director Guillermo del Toro’s elegantly eerie The Devil’s Backbone and thought his Cronos was interesting, and after reading about Hellboy in my movie magazines, I was intrigued by the complex mythology of the comic book series on which it’s based and by the idea of Ron Perlman as an action hero.  And did I mention it was free?

Unfortunately, The Devil’s Backbone is looking more and more like the exception to del Toro’s rule of by-the-numbers action films made with a modicum of style (he also did Blade II and Mimic).  Hellboy is decent-enough entertainment (plus it has kittens! and puppies!  Okay, so they’re hellpuppies, but still…), probably better than most of the action movies that come out in any given year (not that I’d really know, since I stopped seeing them a long time ago), but it’s still pedestrian and pretty conventional.  On the scale of comic-book movies, I’d put it well below Batman and X-Men, but above... okay, I guess I haven't seen any of the really crappy ones.  Let's say, probably on a par with Spider-Man.

The movie does create a rich, if seriously truncated, mythology, which I appreciated (although it never explained why so many people with British accents were running around New York City), but it just wasn’t enough to make the seen-it, done-it, bought-the-trucker-hat action seem like it had any stakes.  Oddly for del Toro, whose Cronos was vividly inventive, Hellboy borrows wholesale from any number of previous, better movies.  The Star Wars rip-offs alone could fill a page.  It can get confusing, too, purely out of sloppy movie-making (for instance, one character tells another, “It’ll be your job to feed him [Hellboy].  He has a thing for cats.”  Silly me, I thought those two sentences were linked, merely because they were uttered in the same breath.  It turns out Hellboy likes – as in, has affection for – cats, but for a while there, I was steeling myself for the sight of Ron Perlman gnawing on a kitten).  And del Toro doesn’t skimp on the ick.

On the plus side, the CGI is very well done, and Perlman is good as the surly Hellboy (who first appears on earth looking like a scarlet Bat Boy).  Jeffrey Tambor is entertaining as the stereotypical bureaucrat, and David Hyde Pierce does his best C3-PO imitation, voicing a telekinetic man-fish.  Del Toro has style to spare but doesn’t overdo it.

But still, honestly, why bother?  It's hardly worth leaving the house for, but if, say, it's on HBO, or Netflix delivers it right to your door... well, you could do worse.

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