saw hellboy last night. it was a little disappointing. most of it was good but everything that was bad was bad because they strayed from the comic storyline and some of the characterizations. i had expected something closer to the comics, especially given mignola was involved and how passionate del toro clearly was about the whole thing.
(spoilers follow, highlight to read…)
kroenen was alright as a ninja, but kroenen wasn’t a ninja in the comics, he was a scientist. they should have had him making his army of the apocalypse from wake the devil, and had THEM be the clockwork ninjas. and there was too much sammael; finish him off in the subways, and have them attacked in russia by kroenen’s army; hellboy is getting whupped by 666 kroenens, liz freaks out and saves his ass.
rasputin was too b-movie villian, and he wore the wrong clothes. would it have been so hard to put him in the black cloak with the blue glowing pentagram? a few good scenes but his beard was too short and he overdid his part.
hellboy was mostly good but he was too much of a dumb kid. in the comics, he was 60 years old. not in freaky demon years, but in earth years. he was old enough to be wise, but he was still physically young enough to kick ass. he made mistakes, but he wasn’t stupid.
abe sapien was pretty much spot-on but woefully underused. why didn’t he go on that final mission, exactly? also, rotten eggs, what?
myers was good in the first half, but the problems with him were largely problems with hellboy’s reaction to him, re hellboy in the comics wouldn’t have had a problem with his presence, and wouldn’t have stalked him on his ‘date’ with liz. also i wish he’d sprung out some kind of power at the end, explaining why he was in the bprd and not the normal fbi. even just minor telekenesis, enough to reach into hellboy’s mind and remind him of what he’s fighting for…
seeing hellboy with the crown of fire unlocking the odgru jahad was neat, but why did he change sides so quickly, twice?
liz was good.
the odgru jahad in their prison at the beginning were excellent. rasputin’s tentacle monster inside was dumb, albeit not entirely out of place in a mignola story. why not simply have the ogdru jahad’s minion awaken out of it’s statue form, as in the comics?
i’m sorry, but ’someone save my kittens!’?? why does he like cats exactly?
(/spoilers)
i don’t know. i liked the first half a lot, but it got too dumb at the end. they strayed too far from the storyline of the first miniseries. it’s one thing to embellish a little for the transfer between comics and film; it’s another to change stuff just for kicks, and create a mishmash of all the various miniseries plus a bunch of other crap.
it would have been a good tv pilot, but i’m a little disappointed having paid $8.25 for that. at least i can go see rotk at the laurelhurst this week.
as blasphemous as this may be, i think blade 2 was better than hellboy. probably becuase there’s no source material being bastardized in that case. i know people think it’s a bastardization of the first blade, but i challenge those people go watch the first one again and explain to me why, exactly, donal logue is less annoying than the tech guy in blade 2. and justify stephen dorff’s self-proclaimed status as the greatest actor of his generation.
blade 2 was a fantastic stupid action movie. blade 1’s plot WAS better, but it wasn’t exactly literature.
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