Hellboy (2004)

Saw Hellboy (2004), a film based on Mike Mignola's comic book of the same name.  This film precedes the Marvel films by a little, but the first Tobey Maguire Spiderman film and the Ang Lee Hulk movie were already out, so this film also helped prove the market and pave the way.  Anyway the plot is very comic book-ish, involving monsters and government agencies, occult Nazis, and fraught, teenage-ish relationships.  It's all pretty fun, but not particularly my cup of tea.

The main engine that drives the Hellboy comics and this film is the protagonist's underwhelmed reactions and workingman nature even in the face of eldritch horrors.  He may be red and have filed-down horns, but he's just an average guy, you know?  There's a scene where he happens upon a boy on a rooftop and has a soulful chat with him about his feelings for one of the other characters.  The boy sympathizes and brings him cookies.  This is peak Hellboy.  In the comics, he's often hilariously put-upon by the monsters, eye-rolling and referring to them with diminutive pet names ("Stinky").  Alas, the Hollywood machine transforms these into snarled one-liners, ala Schwarzenegger or late-franchise John McClain.  He's supposed to be annoyed, not defiant.

Anyway, the film was directed by Del Toro, who was probably attracted to the property because of its kindliness to its monster heroes.  Abe Sapien bears a distinct resemblance to the monster in The Shape of Water.  As with his other films too, here there's a bureaucrat who is the voice of intolerance and repression but who is also clearly miserable and suffering in his job.  It's a background note, but this archetype also shows up in Shape of Water, Pan's Labyrinth, and others (I saw a youtube video on this once) so I enjoyed spotting this Del Toro-ism.

The film is mostly spectacle and fight scenes.  I am too old and jaded to be really delighted by these things, but they supplied me with a good amount of striking imagery which I enjoyed.  Also, while the fights are the focus of the film, the characters do exist outside of the fights and even have some relationship problems (albeit sit-com-level stuff.  "Closer" it ain't.)  But it wasn't just empty spectacle, which was nice.  Not my cup of tea, but not exactly a bad cup either.