So, I went and saw Hellboy 2: The Golden Army last night Thursday, that being the FDA-approved manner of preparing for an interview the next day (more about that later), and, well.
First, Irrelevant Reaction: Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the primary result of seeing a movie called Hellboy 2: The Golden Army would be to have Barry Manilow stuck in my head for twelve hours.
Actual, Cogent Reaction: I liked it, but not nearly as much as I thought I was going to.
I think the biggest problem was that, while each of the individual elements of the movie all worked, more or less, taken as a whole the movie just failed to gel. You’ll likely find this weird, but I got the same sense from Hellboy 2 that I got from Cable Guy, in that neither of these movies could decide what they were.
Cable Guy, you see, couldn’t figure out if Jim Carrey was Jim Carrey, Wacky Comedian, or Jim Carrey, Creepy Psycho, and therefore whether it was a comedy or a suspense thriller, and as a result managed to be just dumb, mostly. In the same way, Hellboy 2 couldn’t decide whether it was a comic book action flick or a lyrical fairytale, and as a result managed to be a very pretty, very frenetic mess.
A movie can decide to be a cross between genres or types, of course, but there’s a difference between deliberate genre-busting and waffling, and you can almost always tell which is which. Cross-genre pollination is one of those things where it's usually an all-or-nothing proposition; if it works, it's brilliant, and if it doesn't, it... isn't. And to a certain extent, of course, whether it works or not is in the eye of the beholder.
For my money, I beheld something that was almost brilliant. But not quite.
For added confusion, HB2 also couldn’t decide whether it was a comedy or a drama. And before you throw horrible words like “dramedy” at me, let me add that those are not quite the words I mean, but I'm not sure how else to put it, except to ask: were we supposed to take these characters, and in particular the various romantic entanglements, seriously or not?
I'm just saying, throwing in a "guys get drunk and angst about women over Barry Manilow" scene, when the "guys" in question are, basically, a big red demon and a talking fish... that's kind of a lot, there. You really don't want to hang out too close to that line between "laughing with" and "laughing at", trust me. Not in this genre (either one).
And if the movie doesn’t know how it wants to treat these characters, how are we the audience supposed to figure it out?
I think, personally, that we were supposed to take them seriously, but with characters as outlandish as these and in the absence of definitive clues, your modern-day American audience is going to go for the opposite, sorry.
I think this was a clash of cultural aesthetics, really. Guillermo del Toro is best known in the U.S. (at least until The Hobbit comes out) for his Spanish-language film Pan’s Labyrinth, which if you’ve seen needs no introduction, and which if you haven’t, well, sorry, because (a) you’re missing out, and (b) you probably won't get what the problem is I'm having here. But Pan's Labyrinth had an extremely distinctive, whimsical-yet-grotesque, fairytale-to-the-nth-degree mien, that del Toro enthusiastically brought to play in the wise-cracking, tongue-in-cheek, John-McClane-in-big-red-demon-clothing style of Hellboy 2 and - well, it wasn't chocolate and peanut butter, so much as it was chocolate and...fried chicken.
By which I mean, it's probably not the grossest combo you've ever come across, nor is it necessarily completely unpalatable, but it is definitely very very weird, and you're definitely going to raise an eyebrow at such a concoction when it is plunked down in front of you. Are you really supposed to eat this, or is the chef just fucking with you?
The styles were just a little too incompatible. One is meant to be entirely irony-free, while the other is nothing but irony, and never the twain shall meet, sort of. Maybe it's easier for some people to switch their sense of the ridiculous on and off like that, but for me, I kind of had whiplash by the end.
I salute the film, however, as a valiant try, and I think that if he had had even slightly less antithetical narratives to bash together, del Toro would have made a fabulously awesome film. Maybe next time.