Hellboy II turned out to be the top box-office draw in North America this weekend, and deservedly so. This is not only the most entertaining movie of the summer season, it also is the first one to deliver what you want in your blockbuster entertainment: Big excitement, big laughs, a touch of pathos and a ton of style. Though director Guillermo Del Toro tosses in hommages to everything high and low, from Ray Harryhausen to Hayao Miyazaki, Jean Cocteau to John Landis, Terry Gilliam to--unless I'm mistaken--Vincente Minnelli (!), the references never feel like self-conscious Tarantino-esque asides; Del Toro has taken his influences and forged them into a distinctive style of his own. The story (which plays like something from Jack Kirby's crazy New Gods era at DC Comics) draws us in without getting lost in details we don't care about, and Del Toro's direction shows a nice sense of scale. Though much use is made of CGI, it is for once deployed with great imagination, and many of the most wondrous visions are created with actual settings and on-set effects.
Yet as good as Hellboy II is, I'm still more intrigued by the case of this weekend's biggest flop, Meet Dave. As I pointed out in a previous post, this one was co-written by a personal hero of mine, Bill Corbett of Mystery Science Theater 3000 cult fame, and it seems like a good test case of that old Hollywood axiom that nobody sets out to make a bad movie. Sounds good...but is it true?
I haven't seen Meet Dave (though of course I've seen the trailer and the same clips everyone else has, enough to make me feel justified in saying: Blecchh!), and I certainly haven't read the script, and so have no idea if in its original pre-rewrite form it might have served as a blueprint for something better. But surely when the studio hired Eddie Murphy to star and Brian Robbins to direct--when, in other words, they reunited the key players of Norbit to work their non-magic again--they couldn't have seriously imagined anything good would result.
Yes, people went to see Norbit, and God help them, some of those people might even have laughed. But did anyone like it? Even on the dumb-but-funny level of a typical Adam Sandler outing? No, of course not. In fact, it's widely believed that its release, right before Academy Award season, torpedoed Murphy's Oscar chances for Dreamgirls. That's how reviled Norbit was within showbiz circles--so why would anyone in the industry okay a follow-up from the same creative talent?
They knew, in other words, that Meet Dave was destined to be crap. In all likelihood, the uncredited script rewrites were a deliberate attempt to dumb it down, to make it cruder, to appeal to what Hollywood must think is the broadest demographic of all--a nation of idiots. They wanted a movie without a whiff of originality or wit, because that's the only thing they know how to market.
I don't think Hellboy II will be a huge smash hit--it will basically cease to exist as soon as The Dark Knight opens next week--but even its modest success may serve as a reminder to Hollywood that yes, there are people out there with a taste for something better, even in popcorn entertainment.
