By Scott Brown and Brian Raftery
Each week during the summer movie season, Wired writers and movie nerds Scott Brown and Brian Raftery fire up their instant-messaging clients and do a tag-team critique of a new flick. Sort of like Siskel and Ebert, but geekier and funnier. Like Statler and Waldorf but, you know, non-Muppet.
This week, Brown (Statler76) and Raftery (Waldorf75) have a devilishly good time digging into Hellboy II: The Golden Army. (Read Wired.com's Hellboy II review.)
Statler76: hellboy's nominally about eco-terrorist elves making war on feckless mankind, with hellboy -- the dudely, irascible son of Lucifer -- as our last line of defense. But really, it's about monsters.
Waldorf75: at some point, guillermo del toro is going to have to explain his errant eyeball fixation
Waldorf75: he must make the creepiest sock puppets of all time
Waldorf75: with googly eyes on the front chin
Statler76: His boyhood bedroom must've looked like hieronymus bosch's.
Statler76: But with less stereoscopic vision.
__(Spoiler alert: __Minor plot details follow.)*
Statler76: Does del toro have children?
Statler76: SHOULD he have children?
Statler76: Or even impressionable tumors?
Waldorf75: i dunno. but the "troll market" scene accomplished something i hadn't seen in a sci-fi/fantasy movie in years: monsters that didn't look like mashups of bigger, more successful monsters
Statler76: Yes!
Waldorf75: i feel like most of the CGI-era creatures are 50 percent velociraptor, 25 percent cockroach and 25 percent Godzilla, with a little bit of roger ailes thrown in there.
Statler76: Whereas del Toro's monsters seem to grow spontaneously, like, well, cancer. He's got an original eye, that Guillermo. The one that's actually focused on something.
Statler76: It's that other eye, the wandering eye, that i wonder about.
Waldorf75: how so, me hearty?
Statler76: I enjoyed this movie, but I will say: there are drawbacks to comic-book storytelling.
Statler76: This movie is more splash-panel than actual, propulsive narrative.
Statler76: I mean, I love a hero who just hangs out and kills a sixer of Tecate while there's a deadly, warmaking elf on the loose ...
Statler76: but I guess I'm just not sure what the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense's chartered for ... random supernatural cleanup in the New York metropolitan area? With no follow-up?
Waldorf75: when he quits working for the government at the end, i thought, "wait, why is he even with them to begin with?"
Statler76: excellent question.
Statler76: I mean, in the first one, he had Professor Broome, his father figure. Who wouldn't feel loyal to cuddly, avuncular John Hurt?
Statler76: On the other hand: what supernatural being in his right mind would work for Jeffrey Tambor?
Statler76: And without good dental, clearly?
Waldorf75: is it just me, or is tambor improvising through most of this?
Waldorf75: it seems that, when it comes to the film's comedic elements, the performers are doing all of the heavy lifting
Statler76: Yeah, agreed. Although I kind of wish they'd let Perlman lift more.
Statler76: I like Hellboy. He's a great character. Let HIM riff a little!
Statler76: I felt like half his one-liners had been pruned.
Waldorf75: yeah, he felt zinger-deprived
Statler76: I wish they'd let some great wit take one more pass at this script before shooting it
Statler76: Half the time, Hellboy grimaces skeptically at the camera ... and says nothing.
Statler76: I wish they'd just let him BE Philip Marlowe.
Statler76: The Bogey version. Not the Eliot Gould version.
Statler76: Whom i saw in the troll market, i think.
Waldorf75: true. who would have thought that the most quotable character in this movie would be the Colonel Klink-ish ball of Teutonic gas, piped into a rubber suit and voiced by Family Guy's Seth Macfarlane?
Statler76: Or that "suck my schwanstucker" would be the signature line?
Waldorf75: i loved dr. johann krauss. i loved his no-nonsense approach, his professorial gesticulations and his weird industrial mandibles.
Statler76: Decent industrial mandibles might be the only way to rescue a retired ethnic stereotype at this point.
Waldorf75: i can only hope tom cruise's nazi movie will include a scene in which a ball of gas hits a demon in the nuts with a gym locker
Statler76: Unlikely. "Own -- but don't display -- your demon-gas nut-crunching" is the fifth tenet of Scientology.
Statler76: I've got to say, this is the nerdiest, most starless script ever to put away a second-weekend Will Smith blockbuster.
Waldorf75: so nerdy!
Statler76: References to "glamour"! Elf language … outside a Lord of the Rings movie!
Waldorf75: steampunk! Mos Eisley spaceport! "aliens"! oh, and john hurt, who also popped up in "crystal skull." When it comes to talky late-50s eggheads, hurt's your only casting choice, apparently.
Statler76: Hellboy II gave me great dreams. I feel like it almost needs to expand in water, overnight, for full appreciation.
Statler76: Like an angry, vagina-mouthed plant!
Waldorf75: the vagina-eyed plant didn't make budget
Statler76: hahahaha. But that forties music you hear? It's the old jazz standard "My Vagina-Eyed Sweetheart"
Waldorf75: i have that on my vagina-shaped victrola!
Statler76: So here's another question for you: Is pagan nature really the enemy in this movie? and is there any reason to side with humanity ... at all?
Statler76: Del Toro clearly has no sympathy for rank-and-file homo sapiens
Statler76: but when your hero's the antichrist -- and your most dramatic moment involves the Angel of Death, prophesying the world's destruction at Hellboy's hands -- i guess i'm pumped for something a little bigger than a climactic swordfight.
Statler76: I'm still not entirely sure what the dimensions of this universe are.
Waldorf75: nor am i
Waldorf75: but i have to imagine
Waldorf75: that hellboy 3 -- should it exist -- will somehow use humans in some further capacity, rather than employing them merely as hellboy's nags.
Waldorf75: but hell, maybe earth is just a random location. like dantooine, destined to exist just to be destroyed. Or a satellite campus
Waldorf75: "i'll do two years here, then, when it blows up, i'll move to something bigger"
Statler76: or just go to culinary school.
Waldorf75: "just something more grown-up: a dorm room off-campus, away from the troll market."
Photos: Egon Endrenyi © 2007 Universal Studios.
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