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HELLBOY vs DARK KNIGHT
Why Hellboy 2 is better than The Dark Knight?

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HELLBOY vs DARK KNIGHT
Why Hellboy 2 is better than The Dark Knight? by Jen Frankel

Why Guillermo Del Toro Rocks My Socks Off

After the overwhelming and continuing response to my article on The Dark Knight, I decided that it would be a good career move for me to set myself up for some more controversy. I've got a real thing about being a target.

Namely, that I believe that Hellboy 2 is in every way a superior film to Christopher Nolan's sophomoric bat-saga.

Now, before I attract some outraged, high-pitched squealing from the bat-lovers, please understand - I adore Chris Nolan as a filmmaker. I love the new Batman franchise in a way that makes me even colder to the previous Burton incarnation.

But there's a level of sophistication that Nolan aspires to and misses, while Del Toro is right on the money in every way.

I must admit to having a history of often only seeing entertaining but less than worthy movies twice in the cinema. Hellboy 2 and Star Wars (I was a very savvy preschooler) are the notable exceptions.

A terrific film for me has to combine a number of elements, each equally brilliantly executed. It's appropriate, in the arts' most intensely collaborative medium, that this means not only that each individual and department does a stand-out job, but that there's some kind of higher purpose that unifies the whole, whether the intention is to make a great piece of war-time melodrama like Bridge Over the River Kwai or all-out adventure comedies like the Hellboys.

In purely cinematic terms, both filmmakers work wonders with celluloid - Del Toro has collaborated almost exclusively with the fantastic Guillermo Navarro as DoP (the man who also brought you From Dusk 'Til Dawn, Desperado, and Jackie Brown); Nolan works with Wally Pfister (whose other work is not quite as iconic but solid, including such films as Laurel Canyon and The Italian Job).

I'd say The Prestige is a fully completed, fully realized film that approaches perfection - satisfying in character, conclusion, and theme, and full of beautiful surprises and nasty shocks. True, I'm sure you might think I'd be able to level a similar criticism to this film as I did on The Dark Knight regarding female characters. But even there, the death of Jackman's wife becomes the overshadowing tragedy that fuels his obsession in a way Harvey Dent's never does. In every way, Nolan fulfills the promises of his own talent and the complex story.

Not so in Batman, and I've harped on the throw-away female characters enough. But my real problem with Batman is the way it takes on so many themes, and adds thread after thread to the story, layering a mat of fibres impossible to entangle even in two and a half hours. There is enough material for three films here: one about Batman and Dent competing for and both losing the loves of their lives, one about Batman learning to believe again that humanity is worth protecting, and one about how his obsession drives even his most ardent supporters away. Let's not even talk about introducing and disposing of two of the best Batman villains in one sitting. Criminal!

It's not a plus in any art form to overreach - "leave them wanting more" is the best advice anyone gave an artist from the stand-up comic to the rock star. I left Batman wanting much, much less, and what there was delivered with a defter hand.

I know - this was supposed to be about Del Toro. And it is - but maybe I'm just a little afraid to trumpet my appreciation for Hellboy 2, when I know it's not going to be the kind of Oscar-contender that The Dark Knight will likely be, and has definitely not garnered what could be called significant critical praise.

But, despite the fact that their filmographies are approximately the same length, I have far more appreciation for Del Toro's ability to integrate all the elements of a production into a cohesive whole.

There's no real counter-opinion to the impression that Pan's Labyrinth was not only a major fantasy film but a significant work of cinema destined to join the cannon of great movies. It brought Del Toro to the world's attention, and garnered him offers to direct I Am Legend and the latest installment of the mega-million Harry Potter series. He turned them down to do the sequel to Hellboy.

I knew of Del Toro from the beginning of his directorial career, although I didn't put the pieces together until researching this article. His debut feature, Cronos, a dark and quirky fantasy, was one of my absolute favorite films of the 90s, a vision of a twisted quest for immortality on par with Nolan's earlier film The Prestige.

Memento, the film that brought Nolan to prominence, is a work of utter deftness, a story based on a conceit that in lesser hands could easily have become stale or even annoying. Insomnia is a flawed film, one that loses sight of its own themes in what seems like a bit of sleep-walking - we never quite know what to think of either of the two main characters, and so never fully connect with either.

But Nolan's films, broadly speaking, tread shallow water when it comes to the axes of drama – the tension between love and hate, laughter and sorrow, that make great connections with an audience almost inevitable. That's probably one of the greatest successes of The Dark Knight, that the Joker injects a humor (twisted though it may be) into the otherwise stolid mood. Gary Oldman's Gordon is terrific for that too, but otherwise, little quips issue from the characters mouths' with the charm of an Arnold one-liner.

That's what makes Hellboy so enjoyable, in my opinion, that Del Toro gets not only fine, nuanced performances out of his mostly non-human characters but knows how to pace a film so that nothing is ever boring, but nothing is ever the same.

There's lots of love and hate (the former emotion of which felt curiously absent from The Dark Knight, at least to me), and a good deal of laughter and pain. And, in purely cosmic terms, the stakes in Hellboy were a lot higher, although possibly more enormously abstract than a lot of viewers could hook into. After all, Hellboy is a sweet, funny (enormous and ugly) guy who charms as well as frustrates with his often shortsighted plans - and he's supposed to be destined to destroy the world. Now THAT'S a character you have to worry about cheering for.

In the end, Hellboy was good clean fun, and had a lot to say on a purely subversive level about colonialism (North American/human culture displacing other/supernatural ones, merely through ignorance and greed) and about the nature of violence.

Batman had any number of themes, so many that I didn't know what the film was about by the end. When I think about it, and I have, it's to wonder why the hell no one pared the script down to the essentials.

Which do I think will stand the test of time? Well, obviously more people are going to watch, buy, dissect, and praise The Dark Knight. But I think the film - through a half-slavish attendance on certain limited storylines coupled with a pretty transparent attempt to make a bigger, badder Batman for the summer crowd - lacks the cohesiveness to bear too many repeated watchings.

And, I mean, I've already seen Hellboy 2 twice.

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