I’ve long been of the opinion that one of the few film directors able to properly adapt comic book properties for the screen is Guillermo del Toro. Sam Raimi also managed to inject a sense of fun and overblown melodrama into his Spider-Man films. How could anyone hate emo-Peter Parker! It was just goofey.
Del Toro surpasses him due to a combination of humour and a blanket enthusiasm for fantasy. This is a man who would think H. P. Lovecraft is appropriate bedtime reading for children, whose Spanish language films are lauded as high fantasies or examples of magic realism. Whereas Hellboy, a comic book by Mike Mignola which Del Toro has being raving about for years, is seen as slumming somehow.
See not all comic book films have to be dour. Perhaps this is the inheritance of the grim ‘n’ gritty era that the comic industry has had a horrible tendency of falling back into again and again since the 80’s (see Alan Moore’s parody of Frank Miller’s Daredevil for an example). I suspect that it’s more than that however. In the US and the UK comic books are viewed as a distraction for children. The cavalier attitude towards a ‘juvenile’ artform’ might be more a holdover from the colonial Protestant work ethic, an early form of Constructivism that is still with us.
Yet juvenile or not, comic book films are big business. The Dark Knight made a tremendous amount of money for Warner Brothers, allowing them to reclaim some of the territory staked out by Marvel Entertainment with their Spider-Man and Iron Man franchises. However, troubling reports have emerged that Warner execs believe it was the doom and gloom factor that resulted in box office success. From the WSJ:
Like the recent Batman sequel — which has become the highest-grossing film of the year thus far — Mr. Robinov wants his next pack of superhero movies to be bathed in the same brooding tone as “The Dark Knight.” Creatively, he sees exploring the evil side to characters as the key to unlocking some of Warner Bros.’ DC properties. “We’re going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it,” he says. That goes for the company’s Superman franchise as well.
This development probably also sunk the promising Captain Marvel project, a character whose nature is sweetness and light, about as brooding as a lemon-flavoured lollipop unicorn. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns was itself not a trip to the amusement park, with the Kryptonian becoming an absentee father and a villainous plot involving real estate. How much more bleak and depressing do they want it to be? Warners talk of positioning the property of Superman. I can’t help but feel what they mean is filming the nihilistic Dark Knight for a second time and simply slapping another coat of paint on it.
See this is what I like about Del Toro’s Hellboy 2. There was no concern for overblown realism. No child abandonment. No scenes of gratuitous violence towards women. A gun-toting prince of hell went about punching elves, trolls and giant Hyperborean war machines with a grin and a quip. And what the hell’s wrong with that?
