Bohemian Cinema By Jonathan Pacheco

“Hellboy II”: Beta Testing “The Hobbit”

Tags: Fantasy, Hellboy, Guillermo del Toro, Lord of the Rings, The House Next Door

An excerpt from my review of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, featured at The House Next Door:

While waiting in line for the screening of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, I overhead someone say that Guillermo del Toro’s latest is being seen as his audition tape for The Hobbit. He’d already gotten the gig before Hellboy II’s release, but I imagine that the Mexican filmmaker pulled out some edited footage to show to Peter Jackson & Co. when bidding for the Tolkien prequel. Plenty of fans have already been sold on del Toro’s ability to handle a project with the style and magnitude of The Hobbit, but I’ve felt that some of his more recent endeavors have failed to live up to their potential. Blade II was a very solid upgrade for that franchise, but I was burned by both the under-developed Pan’s Labyrinth and the bogged-down first Hellboy. In Hellboy II, I was looking for a reason to believe in del Toro and, if anything, he does manage to give viewers a substantial hint of what to expect in Middle Earth.

Read the full review.