The Fantastic Two--Hellboy and Van Helsing

Note that "fantastic" in that context does not necessarily mean "dude, what a fantastic movie." It means that these movies have elements of the fantastical in them. :-)

We'll start with Hellboy, just because I feel like it. Starring Ron Perlman as a domesticated demon with a cocky attitude and a love for cigars and Red Bull energy drinks, the movie opens with a flashback to 1943. The origin of Hellboy is "explained" as a botched Nazi experimentation with the occult, in which a masked German assassin, a blonde Nazi chick without a shred of character to her credit, and a mysteriously resurrected Rasputin successfully open a portal to...somewhere, wherein they try to free the seven gods of chaos from their crystal prison, which has apparently been orbiting the earth all this time. These seven gods actually look more like PotC's Kraken created on a tighter budget, as they all have tentacles for some reason, but we'll let that slid for now.

So instead of these tentacled chaos gods popping through the portal as planned, a little baby boy demon comes through, is adopted by a company of G.I.'s and pacifist Catholic professor, and grows up sixty years later into Ron Perlman with prosthetics. Professor chap is now fixing to biff off to the other life within a few years, so he recruits a soppy FBI agent named Meyers to become Hellboy's new liaison. In the secret, underground government building where Hellboy lives, Meyers discovers not only the demon, but also a mutated semi-aquatic gentleman by the name of Abe (so-named because he was discovered on the day of Lincoln's assassination) and, later, a chick with pyrotechnic abilities who is Hellboy's true love, though she is unsure of whether she reciprocates the feeling.

So basically we have the X-Men, except not as many of them and with less cool powers. All of them are rather pathetic at fighting: Hellboy spends most of the movie getting the crap beaten out of him by the movie's mass-manufactured antagonist, a very odd quadrupedal-amphibian-thing that looks a bit like a mixture of Davy Jones, the alien from Alien, and an iguana, and which is known as the "Hound of the Resurrection" because it can, well, come back to life. In the mix we also have all the prologue figures: the Nazi assassin, Rasputin (why??) and his blonde-haired Nazi sidekick/lover, who once again has basically no role in the film.

The film did have its decent points, the best of which would be Hellboy's character, which was slightly less superficial than the supporting cast's, but even then his moral choice at the climax of the film was about as hard and complicated as choosing between chocolate cake and carrot cake for one's birthday. A character also manages to have her soul sucked out of her and then pop back to life twenty minutes later at the simple behest of another person, still seemingly be-souled. I wasn't quite clear on how that was supposed to work.

The cinematography was decent, the soundtrack I don't remember, and the character development virtually nonexistent. No one has much of a character even to begin with, so developing it would be a problem in any case. There are some occasional, generalized references to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, but the movie is also philosophically pretty hollow, and the provocative idea of a righteous demon is not really explored in the kind of serious detail that might make for a very thoughtful action film. I give it a 4 out of 10.

Next we move to Van Helsing, a giant set-piece film that basically plops Hugh Jackman into the heart of every scrap of Eastern European horror-folklore that Bram Stoker and his rabid imitators ever dug up. Call me a Philistian fiend, I enjoyed watching most of it, but it was an extremely predictable film relying excessively on digital effects and rehashed Transylvanian legends watered down and made "cooler" for the benefit of a 21st century audience. Hugh Jackman plays Gabriel Van Helsing, a man evidently some four or five hundred years old despite looking to be in his mid-thirties and possessing no supernatural powers (how this was supposed to work I don't know, but Dracula claimed Van Helsing was the one who murdered him when he was still among the living, and that was four hundred years prior to the events of the film). The movie contains an improbable number of fantastical creatures, including Mr. Hyde--an immense troll-like creature for no reason whatsoever--the Frankenstein monster, a compendium of werewolves, a trio of vampire women, Dracula himself, and their immense brood, which are twice awakened only to promptly die about ten to twenty minutes later by some act of Van Helsing's heroism.

Van Helsing is a kind of anti-spiritual darkness knight working for a watchdog branch of the Vatican whose very existence remains a secret. He gets sent to Transylvania because: four hundred years earlier, the patriarch of some family there, I believe the Valerians or some such like, swore an oath that he and his descendants would never enter heaven until he had slain Dracula, and the Valerians are now down to two, a brother-sister duo who divide their time between fighting savage creatures and trying to look sexy. If these siblings are offed, then the entire family line for sixteen generations is looking at a one-way ticket to purgatory with no probation. It seems a silly oath, you know, on a par with Herod's promise to Salome and Jephthah's to God, but this film couldn't really bear the weight of its own backstory anyway.

Accompanied by David Wenham in a pathetic role as a simpering friar/scientific genius, Van Helsing takes his hideously anachronistic weapons cache with him to Romania. This weapons cache bears some mention. This film is supposed to take place in the late 1880s, yet VH owns contraptions that the technology to operate probably didn't exist until the 1950s or later, including a gas-powered fully automatic crossbow and a pair of spinning blades like circular saws, which apparently have some miniaturized on-board coal burning facility, because I don't think batteries were really around in any compressed or marketable form until at least the 1920s. And as for a gas-powered crossbow--hello? The first machine gun came out in 1881, so I really don't think Van Helsing could have gotten a hold of the technology to fire miniature bolts out of a rotating drum on a machine-bow.

Anyway, end of my weapons complaint. VH shows up in Transylvania, where after facing the inveterate populace and conducting a frosty conversation with the Valerian sister (overplayed by Kate Beckinsale), he deals with a triple vampire attack, slaying one with a crossbow bolt dipped in holy water. Beckinsale, who was completely trounced in the fight and would have almost assuredly died without VH's intervention, nevertheless still resents his coming, even though the most casual viewer can tell that she is completely worthless for the task at hand. From there the characters slog their way through a variety of dangers, spared countless times by the irresistible temptation all the bad creatures have to gloat, make speeches, and/or growl triumphantly over the good guys before finishing them off. Beckinsale's character, as a matter of fact, opines to a vampiress just after stabbing her through the heart with a stake, "next time, don't waste time talking to some one before you kill them"--a bit of advice that sounds almost self-apologetic in a movie like this one, and should probably have been written on a card and distributed to the entire cast and crew during pre-production.

Unconvincing, bloated with CG, and placing characters who make the average brick wall seem alive with development and growth into random dangerous situations, Van Helsing suffers acutely from the many banes and fevers of the Hollywood fantasy action film (or shall I say, the Hollywood film, period). As another reviewer commented elsewhere, Jackman does okay with his part, he just doesn't have much of one. Beckinsale's character is there purely to be female and curvaceous and kind of sassy and go around wielding a sword and then utterly fail to actually be of any use except by sheer luck. The film also makes some vague nods to the Catholicism more or less inherent in the Dracula story (crucifices, the sign of the cross, holy water, etc.) but generally ends up mocking religious faith more than honoring it: David Wenham's silly character excuses both cursing and fornication by pleading that he is "just a friar" as opposed to a full-fledged monk, which is completely ridiculous and rather offensive. Despite the fact that I generally had fun watching it, I'll give Van Helsing a 3 out of 10.

I'll be reviewing X-Men Origins: Wolverine in a tad, and, God willing, get these bally things, as well as the many other reviews of both mine and David's making, on Tolle Lege before the world ends, at least. :-)