BLADE II: The Dark Knight Returns

Blade II (2002) – Directed by Guillermo del Toro – Starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman, Leonor Varela, Norman Reedus, Luke Goss, Thomas Kretschmann, Danny John-Jules, Donnie Yen, and Tony Curran.

BLADE II is one of the most successfully stylish films I’ve ever seen.

Even if the story sucked (and it doesn’t), I could watch BLADE II and enjoy it simply for how cool it looks, moves, and sounds. With Guillermo del Toro stepping into the director’s chair for Stephen Norrington, the BLADE franchise loses a bit of its grittiness and gains some flash in return. The main elements still remain, however: BLADE II is an R-rated superhero/horror film full of violence and blood, and Wesley Snips and Kris Kristofferson still provide the rock-solid narrative backbone.

One of the best decisions made concerning BLADE II was to tell a new story instead of simply redoing the first story; the stakes are amped up here, first by having Blade (Snipes) searching for his mentor/mechanic Whistler (Kristofferson) and leaving a trail of dead vampire bodies throughout Eastern Europe. When he finds the old man, Whistler is being held in a vat of blood, the vampires regenerating his body after they bit him and he offed himself in the first film. Blade brings Whistler to his temporary HQ, which he now shares with a new tech guy, Scud (Norman Reedus), and forces him on a one-night detox that does, admittedly, feel like a bit of a plot contrivance to get us from where we started to resetting the old Whistler. The film builds on this idea, though, teasing us with the possibility that Whistler’s vamp time has altered his allegiances.

The new HQ is attacked by some vampire assassins who are dressed in such a way that they now look like early costume designs for del Toro’s later Hellboy, Hellboy 2, and Pan’s Labyrinth films.

All of this happens within the first few sequences of the movie, and you can already tell that del Toro is going for a more stylish approach to the material. In the first BLADE, there was an attack on Blade and Whistler’s HQ by some vampires, and just like last film their current HQ is some kind of abandoned factory. The attack itself is rendered very differently this time around, however, as del Toro makes these vamps highly trained assassins, so there’s lots of jumping and flipping, lots of sword fighting and kicking, and lots of visual flair, both in terms of how the action is filmed and in the film’s color palette. Del Toro likes to paint his scenes with highly saturated colors to balance off all the darkness that’s unavoidable in a movie with vampires.

The two attacking vamps (dressed in head-to-toe black leather and goggles) reveal themselves to be Nyssa (Leonor Varela) and Asad (Danny John-Jules), and there’s a nice twist in that they’re coming to Blade to ask for his help. They bring him to meet one of the Big Bad Vamps, Eli Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann), who tells Blade there’s a new breed of mutated vamp out there who are feasting on vampires. Blade, of course, doesn’t see an issue with this, but then Damaskinos makes the point that when the Reapers are done feasting and turning regular vampires, where else are they gonna go except to eat humans?

It’s a rather simple but highly effective premise as Blade and his enemies are forced to work together. Nyssa and Asad have been training and leading the Blood Pack, a group of vampire assassins that are being trained to kill Blade. Nobody is happy about this, but the vampire Reinhardt (Ron Perlman) takes the lead on the anti-Blade rhetoric, and it’s a wise move because Reinhardt is, well, because Reinhardt is Ron Perlman. Perlman and Snipes have great chemistry together, in that Perlman is taller, grunts louder, and looks perfectly willing to stand toe-to-toe with Blade. Reinhardt functions as the Evil Whistler, in many regards, as they’re both the old curmudgeon/mentor figure of their respective units. One of the best aspects of BLADE II is simply listening to Whistler spout profanities around at Blade, Scud, Reinhardt, and anyone else who gets in his way.

BLADE II expertly uses action sequences to advance the narrative; instead of having a bunch of set pieces in between all the killing to build the plot, BLADE II is just as likely to introduce story elements inside the action sequences as it is during the downtime, such as questioning Whistler’s allegiances or introducing a subplot concerning Nomak (Luke Goss), the first Reaper, not killing Nyssa during a big Blood Pack vs. Reapers fight. It’s a simple but highly effective storytelling technique, as it makes the action exist for reasons beyond the cinematic coolness of watching vampires and Reapers and half-vampires and humans kill each other.

By having two enemy factions working together, the constant question is not if there’s going to be a betrayal of the uneasy alliance, but when the two sides are going to betray the other. Eventually it’s Blade who gets taken out by the Blood Pack, and then he, Whistler, and Scud are brought to Damaskinos’ lair, where Scud reveals he’s one of Damaskinos’ familiars. Blade knew this, of course, and there’s a good bit of comedy as he detonates a small bomb that had been connected to Reinhardt’s skull. Scud is all, “Ha, ha, B, it’s a fake!” and then outs himself as a spy, and Blade tells him, “No, it’s not,” and then triggers the bomb, causing Scud to explode.

It’s a pretty funny moment in a movie without a lot of funny in it. Most of the humor comes from the characters trash talking each other, and it provides the right amount of levity to all of the serious talk focusing on the Reaper problem.

The ending sees Damaskinos revealed as the creator of the Reaper virus and then everyone kills each other, with only our heroes making it out alive. It’s fitting that the film sets up Damaskinos as the father of Nyssa and “father” of Nomak, as their dysfunctional unit eventually sees all of them dead, while the dysfunctional family of Blade and Whistler survives.

BLADE II is another excellent edition to the Marvel catalog, and one that only gets better with repeated viewings.

HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY: I Can’t Smile Without You

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) – Directed by Guillermo del Toro – Starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Jeffrey Tambor, Luke Goss, Anna Walton, John Hurt, and Seth MacFarlane.

It is easy to get lost in the visual splendor that is HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, because there are few films that look this gorgeous. What makes THE GOLDEN ARMY the rarest of cinematic treats is that I cannot think of any movie off the top of my head that so wonderfully blends two unique visual styles from two unique visual giants together so seamlessly and sumptuously.

Unlike the first HELLBOY and Sin City, which always strike me as Guillermo del Toro and Robert Rodriguez doing their best to bring Mike Mignola’s and Frank Miller’s comics to life, or 300 and Watchmen, where Zack Snyder’s visual style overwhelms Miller’s and Dave Gibbons’ respective styles, THE GOLDEN ARMY takes Mignola’s characters, runs them through del Toro’s universe, and both visions stay strong.

THE GOLDEN ARMY puts a smile on my face from start to finish. The film opens at Christmastime in 1955, where a pre-teen Hellboy begs his adopted father Trevor Bruttenholm (John Hurt) to tell him a story before bed, and after a bit of hemming and hawing, he relates the story of an ancient war between humans and magical creatures. The magical creatures create the Golden Army, an unstoppable force but King Balor is horrified by what he’s done, and so forges a truce with humans. His son, Prince Nuada, is not a fan of this political move, and so he goes into exile. This whole sequence is modeled to look like the coolest Tool video ever made, as it looks like its all done with wooden puppets.

Cut to the present and things have advanced since the original HELLBOY film. Hellboy and Liz (Ron Perlman and Selma Blair) are living together inside the BPRD facility in New Jersey but Liz is feeling like she needs some space. Which is complicated by the fact that she’s pregnant. She’s not telling Hellboy because she doesn’t even realize it until after Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) senses it and tells her.

Wisely, del Toro makes the camaraderie between Hellboy, Liz, and Abe is the centerpiece of the film. While they all clearly respect and love one another, there’s all of these dual partnerships that exclude the third: Liz and Abe know Liz is pregnant but Hellboy doesn’t, Liz and Hellboy are romantically involved but Abe has no one, and Hellboy and Abe are best buddies while Liz doesn’t have a female friend anywhere. The best scene that displays this is Hellboy and Abe getting drunk together as they commiserate about women.

Abe is completely inexperienced with the opposite sex and Hellboy acts like the expert he very much is not. It’s great acting from Perlman and Jones, and when they combine to sing Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Live Without You” and get drunk on Tecate Light, they create some genuine movie magic. The song properly serves as the emotional core of the film, as our three leads all face decisions about just what they’d do without their most cherished loved one. I don’t like to tell you what to think, but if you can watch this scene and not have a smile break out across your face and don’t join in with the sing-a-long, well … you’re probably in need of your heart growing three sizes someday.

The film uses these third wheel pieces to create some tension in the narrative to work alongside the main narrative, which is the return of Prince Nuada (Luke Goss). Nuada wants to reclaim the three pieces of the magical crown that control the Golden Army, so he steals the human’s piece at an auction and then kills his dad. This gives him two pieces and his twin sister Nuala (Anna Walton), who goes into hiding until she runs into Abe and Hellboy, who bring her under BPRD protection.

The narrative is solid, and the visuals are every bit as great. There’s gorgeous sets everywhere, including the Troll’s Market, the magical beings lair beneath a bridge, and the underground city where the Golden Army waits. What’s really impressive is that these sets are rundown and kinda ugly and del Toro and his crew manage to make them look totally amazing. Part of this comes from contrasting the dull settings with bright and colorful characters, but there’s also the sheer awesomeness of the designs, which trump their conditions.

Abe ends up falling in love with Nuala, which Nuada uses to his advantage when he breaks into BPRD. It’s a quick romance, but then it’s not like they have room to stretch out Abe and Nuala’s courtship. Instead, both Abe and Nuala’s loneliness helps to create their mutual attraction, and they come off as two young people falling in love for the first time.

I was a little disappointed to see that Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) was back being a bit of an administrative prick, but the scene where he complains to Abe about Hellboy hating him is well constructed (there’s all sorts of chaos going on behind them and they just carry on a normal chat) and his anger at Hellboy wanting to let the world know of his existence is well-founded. Manning and Hellboy’s inability to get along, and Hellboy’s decision to definitively out his existence to the public during an investigation into Nuada’s destruction of the auction, forces Washington to send in Johann Strauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane and no, Strauss does not sound like Brian or Peter or Ted), a gaseous entity living inside what looks like an old diver’s suit. Strauss is a bit regimented, but he eventually joins along with our three leads to disobey orders and go after Nuada directly.

During this final sequence, Liz chooses to save Hellboy even though it means the eventual destruction of the world, and Abe does the same, giving Nuada the final piece of the magical crown that allows the Prince to raise the army out of its slumber. The final battle against the Golden Army is pretty darn great (and the largeness of the golden robots at the end of the film contrasts nicely with the battle against the small tooth fairies near the start of the film), and the army is made of what looks like large, fat, golden steampunk robots that can self-repair themselves. Del Toro uses color as well as any non-animation director working right now, and his color palette is continually changing but always rich, and making this final battle against golden robots with red energy works beautifully.

The film tries to generate some traction with the idea that Hellboy is seduced by Nuada’s urging to join the magical creatures against the humans, but it doesn’t really work, with one exception – when Hellboy kills the giant green Elemental (a gorgeously rendered creature), you feel his confusion and pain over his duty conflicting with what he feels is right. Not that it’s okay that the Elemental is flailing about the city, but the Elemental didn’t choose to be there – Nuada put him there, and Hellboy is rightly conflicted over killed the last of its kind. That scene works, but Nuada’s clumsy attempts at seduction don’t because we know that Hellboy’s heart could never seek the destruction of one side over the other.

Genocidal maniacs don’t love Barry Manilow AND Tecate Light. Fact.

Well. Probably.

HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY is a rich, gorgeous, fun cinematic achievement. Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Guillermo del Toro, and all the crew who contributed to the look of the film turn in high quality work, and together they produce a really fantastic movie. Now, if only they could get a third film made …

HELLBOY: There Are Things That Go Bump in the Night

Hellboy (2004) – Directed by Guillermo del Toro – Starring Ron Perlman, Rupert Evans, Doug Jones, Selma Blair, Karel Roden, Ladislav Beran, John Hurt, Bridget Hodson, and Jeffrey Tambor.

During yesterday’s review of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, I lamented the fact that as much as I loved the movie, I didn’t really enjoy watching it anymore. As important as that film was in the development of the cinematic superhero genre and as much as I celebrated the movie, we’ve seen so many origin stories at this point (not to mention the origin of Spider-Man told and re-told countless times across all sorts of media), that the movie doesn’t do a whole lot for me anymore.

Such is not the case with Guillermo del Toro’s HELLBOY, which still stands as something fresh, unique, and unlike anything else. Visually, nothing comes close to the look of HELLBOY, as del Toro, Rick Baker, Mike Mignola, and the rest of the production staff use a rich, saturated palette and Lovecraftian monsters to deliver a film that still looks and feels completely amazing.

HELLBOY opens in Scotland in 1944 with the United States military stopping a Nazi plot to bring the Ogdru Jahad to Earth. The military, led by their young occult adviser Trevor Bruttenholm stop Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden) and his top assassin Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), but not before a red-skinned boy with a honking big right hand and a tail comes through.

This opening sequence quickly and gorgeously sets up the film’s plot and provides Hellboy’s origin without dragging us into an elongated sequence about how he was just a boy from another dimension who got sucked through space and time and blah blah blah. It’s a gorgeously shot sequence; del Toro has a really wonderful ability to create a world that is obviously constructed and yet feels completely real, too, because it’s so consistently rendered. I love the treatment of the military here, too. These soldiers have little time for Bruttenholm’s ideas, but when they’re confronted with a reality they can’t ignore – the arrival of Hellboy – they embrace the challenge. There’s something completely heartwarming about seeing all of these military guys exchange doubt and confusion for big smiles and open hearts, and it’s one of the moments that makes me love this film.

Cutting to the present, we get introduced to the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) through new recruit John Myers (Rupert Evans). I really don’t see the need to walk us through this world – hey look, there’s a fish-looking guy in a tank who likes to read, and over here is a big red demon who likes cats – because John doesn’t really add a whole lot to the film that we couldn’t get without him. There’s a weak subplot with John romancing Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) that’s worth having around just for the great scene where Hellboy spies on them from a rooftop, taking love advice from a nine-year old kid, but after that … it doesn’t bring much. I think the film would have been better served killing John around this point in the film than keeping him around.

Rasputin has been resurrected by Kroenen and his Nazi lover Ilsa Haupstein (Bridget Hodson), and he unleashes a bunch of Lovercraft monsters on the populace. Del Toro does a fantastic job setting the action sequences in different, visually appealing places: a museum in the city, an underwater subway sequence, and an underground structure in Rasputin’s mausoleum. What combines them is that they (along with BRPD HQ) are all soaked in different colors. The museum is a rich yellow, the underwater sequence is murky green, the BRPD HQ has Bruttenholm’s (John Hurt) library on one end and Hellboy’s sloppy “apartment” on the other, and there’s plenty of ice and snow in Russia. HELLBOY is one of those films that’s just a visual joy to look at from start to finish.

Ron Perlman is fantastic as the titular character, delivering one of his very best performances. Hellboy is a big, tough dude with a soft heart, and Perlman beautifully walks that line. In battle, he wants to go in alone, while in his personal life, he desperately wants to not be alone – so long as he gets to be with Liz. He might be rough and strange looking, but he’s got that weakness for Baby Ruth candy bars that makes him come off as completely real. When he tries to tell Liz that he understands why she would want to be with Myers instead, and wishes he could do something about his face, all of the personal pain and pathos that we need to see is laid bare before us. Where Raimi’s Spider-Man kept beating us over the head with the melodrama, del Toro deploys it with much greater skill in HELLBOY.

John Hurt, Doug Jones, and Selma Blair are all good, but Jeffrey Tambor steals the show as an FBI agent forced to publicly dismiss all of the reported sightings of Hellboy and disavow any knowledge of the BPRD. Tambor’s Tom Manning is a jerk, but after Kroenen kills Broom (Bruttenholm’s nickname), Manning personally leads the expedition to hunt Kroenen and Rasputin down. And even though his attitude is of the, “let’s tie up loose ends” variety more than revenge, the guy still goes along. When he and Hellboy are forced to help each other defeat Kroenen, Manning finally sees Hellboy for who he is and not what he forces Manning to have to do. There’s no heart-to-heart moment where Manning apologizes, either. These are both men who have difficulty expressing their emotions, and so instead of a thank you, Manning acknowledgment of his own past sins against Hellboy and appreciation for saving his life come in a dismissive, “What are you doing?” as Hellboy tries and fails to light his cigar with a lighter. “You’ve got to use matches,” Manning insists, lighting one for him, “otherwise you lose the flavor.”

Hellboy tries it and nods his appreciation back, and then goes off to hunt more monsters. It’s really good stuff and a clever bit of character development that the film employs.

HELLBOY takes its time to get where it’s going, moving at a steady pace to build to the big CGI climax. Rasputin wants to use Hellboy to open the portal to bring the Ogdru Jahad to Earth and has stolen Liz’s soul to get him to comply. He starts to do it and then stops himself, stops Rasputin, and gets Liz back.

Every time I watch this movie I get sucked back in to the story and the visuals, and taken with the characters. Everyone here has flaws and they’re very real, very understandable flaws. When Abe (Doug Jones) is underwater with the Lovecraft hounds, you can see the fear on his face and in his actions. It’s just a great film to watch, full of great characters to hang out with for a few hours.

I love HELLBOY.