Summer of the superhero (2): Hellboy II and The Dark Knight

So, my two most anticipated films of the year have come and gone, both sequels, both saddled with the challenge of facing up to an awesome first instalment, both reuniting director and key players, both with the potential for greatness.

One was masterful, one disappointing. Let’s get the disappointment out of the way first.

A few weeks before it opened, I mentioned to a friend that I was eagerly anticipating ‘Hellboy II: the Golden Army’. His response was a cautious, “Might just be more of the same, though.”

Oh, that it had have been! The original ‘Hellboy’ was a delight: it came out of nowhere, unheralded, the brainchild of Guillermo del Toro, a man who had made a career out of alternating highly personal Spanish-language films (‘Cronos’ – what a debut!) with generic Hollywood productions … a ‘one for you, one for me’ arrangement that seemed to serve him well. Only with ‘Hellboy’, it was more a case of ‘one for me while I pretend it’s one for you’. Studio film-making shot through with a style all of his own. And I dug it big time.

I dug ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ a whole lot more – it’s on the personal faves list and I’m itching for it to get pulled out of the hat (a certain revisionist Boulting Brothers classic is next on the list) – and was in a state of almost pant-wetting excitement at the prospect of a ‘Hellboy’ sequel.

Ordinarily, this would be the point where I’d come out with an eminently sarcastic paragraph consisting of a single sentence where every component word is full stopped, just to ram the message home as bluntly as possible. Something like:

But. It. All. Went. Wrong.

I can’t quite bring myself to grind the axe so viciously with ‘Hellboy II’, though. Whatever its deficiencies (see next few paragraphs), it is nothing less than visually magnificent. The troll market sequence is a standout, likewise an extended sequence involving a forest elemental; although seemingly vindictive to begin with, once defeated by Hellboy, it dies the most poetic of all movie deaths, turning a grimy city sidewalk into a pastoral glade. Likewise, del Toro’s take on the angel of death: a deliciously ambivalent creation on every level.

Del Toro’s imagination gets free rein when it comes to the creatures and visuals, and he exploits it in to the full. Oh, that the same degree of imagination, of artistic flair had been lavished on the script. For the script is the albatross around the film’s neck, the millstone forcing it to shuffle when it should sprint, leap, fly …

The original succeeded because of its script, its direction and its cast. All elements lined up and clicked into place. The sequel fails because it takes the intelligent characterisations of its predecessor and dumbs them down. Remember the lovelorn Hellboy (Ron Perlman), worshipping Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) from afar, taking advance on matters of the heart from a nine-year-old kid? A wonderful, perfectly played scene. In the sequel, Hellboy and Liz are a couple and their constant bickering is on par with the last, desperately unfunny, series of ‘Men Behaving Badly’.

Or how about Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), Hellboy’s nominal departmental nemesis: originally a stuffed shirt who later proves his mettle and earns Hellboy’s grudging respect. Here, he’s reduced to a stuttering imbecile paraded in front of the audience for cheap laughs. Liz Sherman’s erstwhile edgy, unpredictable heroine is recast as a doe-eyed sap. Doug Jones as Abe Sapien – a cool, intelligent foil to Hellboy first time round, is forced into a lapdog-like romantic subplot and saddled with dimestore motivation purely to drive the plot forward in the final act.

Yeah, ‘Hellboy II’ is a glory to behold imagery-wise, but its nothing short of a betrayal of everything that made the first film so priceless.

Fortunately, Christopher Nolan doesn’t make the same mistakes in ‘The Dark Knight’. In fact, he doesn’t make any mistakes at all. ‘The Dark Knight’ is not only an improvement on the frankly fucking bloody brilliant ‘Batman Begins’, and not only the best film of the summer, but it’s one of the best films of the year, period.*

I’m aware that I’ve just spent about 600 words bemoaning ‘Hellboy II’ and I could easily knock out twice that many praising ‘The Dark Knight’ to the heavens, but before this posting gets too long, and too reliant upon strings of fanboy-grasped adjectives, I’ll just pick out just four aspects of the film at random and hopefully, if there’s anyone within a hundred miles of a cinema who hasn’t seen it yet, said individual will log off this blog and head for the multiplex in question PDQ:

1) Heath Ledger as The Joker. Christ, I feel his loss so badly watching this film. The Joker is quite simply his greatest performance. It telegraphs the career he would – should – have gone on to. Like Malcolm McDowell in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Ledger tears down the screen, eradicates the boundary between actor and audience, and makes every fucking one of us complicit in his gouts of inspired mayhem.

2) Christian Bale as Batman. Going deeper and darker into Bruce Wayne’s psyche, his balls-to-the-wall acting style creating an even more emphatic schism between the two personalities, Bale takes a comic book (anti) hero and turns him into a mainstream Hamlet. I can’t think of any other blockbusting, studio produced summer event movie that delves with such Shakespeare fearlessness into the compromised morality of its ostensible hero.

3) The supporting cast: Michael Caine, making it a quadruple-whammy after ‘Batman Begins’, ‘Children of Men’ and ‘The Prestige’, doing some of the best work of his career; Morgan Freeman, the Mister Cool of cinema, who – as Antagony & Ecstacy has pointed out – claims the single best line of the film; Gary Oldman, building on the rugged humanity of Lieutenant Gordon in the first film, here developing the character to heights of almost tragic intensity; and Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent/Two Face, the only complaint about whom is that, with The Joker taking centre stage, he doesn’t survive to become the antagonist of a third instalment – Eckhart’s performance would easily have driven another movie.

4) The co-writer and director, Christopher Nolan, who, six films into his career has yet to deliver a film that is less than fascinating, and half of whose filmography – in my opinion – constitutes bona fide masterpieces. For what he’s done so far: slainte, Mr Nolan. For what he has the potential to go on to do: I can’t fucking wait!



*To qualify this remark, two of the US critics’ best films of ’07 – ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’ – didn’t open in the UK till January and February of this year respectively.

The Orphanage

The haunted house movie has a mixed pedigree. For every intelligent, atmospheric chiller that foregrounds character and atmosphere, such as Robert Wise's 1963 Shirley Jackson adaptation 'The Haunting', there's an effects-laden piece of shit that has about as many scares as an episode of 'Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends', such as ... well, such as Jan de Bont's lame 1999 remake. Or 'House on Haunted Hill' or 'Thirteen Ghosts', remakes of films that were scrapings from the bottom of the genre barrel themselves.

Fortunately, foreign film-makers know how to handle this kind of material properly. Outstanding Korean horror film 'A Tale of Two Sisters' gave the haunted house genre its most invigorating shot in the arm since ... well, since the genre was invented, while Alejandro Amenabar's 'The Others' proved that you could go mainstream and cast Hollywood royalty (Nicole Kidman) and still turn in something low-key, restrained and creepy as hell.

Now there's Juan Antonio Bayona's 'The Orphanage', produced by Guillermo del Toro, the - let's not beat about the bush here - frickin' genius behind the likes of 'Cronos', 'The Devil's Backbone' and stone cold modern classic 'Pan's Labyrinth'. And while there are no real surprises in 'The Orphanage' (it's descended from a lineage that can be traced back via 'The Others' to Henry James's 'Turn of the Screw' and as such ticks all the boxes you'd expect), Bayona shoots, edits and structures his film so classically, and with such atmosphere and attention to detail, that it's effortlessly effective.

Want to scare your audience? Then keep the apparitions in the shadows, half hidden. Let creaks and bumps and unexplained noises do the work for you. And when you do play your hand, what's more scary: a guy in a hockey mask with a fuck-off big knife or a little kid in a sack mask standing at the end of a shadowy corridor making strange, inhuman, grunting noises?

The implied is so much more chilling than the explicit. Take the scene where Laura (Belen Rueda) and her adoptive son Simon (Roger Princep) explore some caves along the shoreline near the titular orphanage which Laura grew up in and which, in adulthood, she is renovating prior to its reopening. Calling to Simon after he's been gone too long, she hurries into the cave after him. She finds him in conversation with someone hidden behind an outcropping of rock. Laura, narked that Simon hasn't outgrown the imaginary friends phase, tetchily plays along when Simon asks if his newfound friend Tomas can come over to the orphanage to play. As they walk back, Simon leaves a trail of shells and stones picked from the beach, explaining that Tomas will be able to follow them.

Bayona then plays out a few more scenes, directing his audience's attention elsewhere, before he delivers the payoff: Laura, opening the door the next morning, is startled as she dislodges a pile of stones and shells stacked up against it.

It's simple, it doesn't involve any gore or special effects, but - damn! - it gives you the creeps.

Bayona also plays his cards cleverly in structuring a debate between science and superstition when Simon goes missing and Laura finds herself piggy-in-the-middle between clinically logical police psychiatrist Pilar (Mabel Rivera) and world-weary but sympathetic medium Aurora (Geraldine Chapman). Her gravitation towards Aurora's belief system alienates her partner Carlos (Fernando Cayo), and Laura takes the decision to remain in the orphanage alone, convinced that Simon has been spirited away by the ghosts of former residents.

Bayona invests time in establishing character and motivation: there's every reason to attribute the hauntings to Laura's mental state. An orphan herself, she's been lying to Simon about his parentage, keeping from him the fact that he's victim to a terminal disease. Her relationship with Carlos brittle and almost platonically asexual, there's more than a soupcon of the repression subtext that permeates 'Turn of the Screw'. And yet ... and yet ... plot points tesselate, images and memories and childhood games interlock in a narrative tapestry. Of course it's not in Laura's mind: all the clues are there ... Then Bayona pulls back again, and the possibility creeps in once more that all of this might be the imaginings of a woman slowly losing her grip on sanity. It's a delicate balance that Bayona maintains right till the end.

Sure, you've seen most of what happens in 'The Orphanage' in other movies, but usually done a lot more clumsily. Bayona, playing on the comfortingly familiar in order to craft something decidedly discomforting, knows exactly what he's doing. And he does it exceptionally well.