The week of Christmas always yields little in terms of new Blu-ray releases; this year is no different. The most notable feature is Yann Demange's docudrama White Boy Rick. If the film represents a change of pace from Demange's last film - the violent siege picture '71 - it certainly feels very much of a piece in terms of style and vérité approach. Here, Demange brings his loose, improvisatory style to 1980s Detroit where he takes on the story of Richard Wershe Jr. (newcomer Richie Merritt), a teenager plugged into so many different criminal enterprises that he became an FBI informant when he was fourteen and then, after the FBI was done with him, maybe the Midwest's biggest cocaine dealer under the age of twenty. To paraphrase the great H.I. McDunnough, it ain't exactly Ozzie and Harriet, but the details of Wershe's rise-and-fall are so mindboggling that for a while, Demange is able to maintain our interest on the sheer insanity of it all. That he gets good performances from his cast helps - Merritt is impressive as the title character, but I preferred Matthew McConaughey's honey-baked ham turn as Wershe's low-rent hoodlum of a father as well as the quietly menacing FBI duo of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane. The problem is, all this criminal salaciousness grows wearying after a while, and Demange keeps striking the same note of histrionic grit. You wish that someone funnier had handled this material. The best scenes detail the bizarre mix of affection and criminal competition flowing between Wershe and his scumball family, and I wanted more of that deadpan misery. Something like Michael Bay's underrated Pain & Gain would have been the perfect approach, actually.
Next up is a new steelbook version (a Best Buy exclusive) of Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army. This sequel to Del Toro's 2004 superhero adventure got lost in the shuffle almost immediately following its 2008 release, and for the most unfortunate of reasons: it came out two months after Iron Man and a week before The Dark Knight. You couldn't ask for worse blockbuster timing than that. No way could Del Toro's idiosyncratic fantasy film hope to compete with The Two Most Influential Superhero Movies of The 21st Century. Yet this second Hellboy doesn't deserve such neglect. If its predecessor was a solid at-bat that suffered from some puzzling studio concessions, The Golden Army finds Del Toro mostly liberated to do his own thing. Gone is Rupert Evans' boring audience surrogate; now the misfits of the Bureau for Paranormal Research get to take center stage, with Ron Perlman's cigar-chewing, cat-loving, wisecrack-spewing title character the ringleader of this motley crew. Ostensibly, Hellboy is hunting a rogue Elf prince (Luke Goss) with a yen to destroy all humanity, although the broad narrative strokes here aren't that impressive. Del Toro is just presenting a PG-13-friendly riff on his Blade II setup, even going so far as to cast Goss as a similarly styled sympathetic heavy (no vagina dentata mouth, thankfully). But the visual invention is so audacious that the plot doesn't matter, whether Del Toro is staging a trip through a back-alley troll market (as grand-scale homage to the Mos Eisley cantina scene from Star Wars), having Hellboy's battle against a giant plant monster end on a note of beautiful melancholy, or presenting the film's climactic Angel of Death (Doug Jones, obviously) as a perfect visual synthesis of the Pale Man and Pan from Pan's Labyrinth. Better still are the BPRD team dynamics. Selma Blair and Jeffrey Tambor do great, weird work as the group's human liaisons, and I love the buddy rapport between Hellboy and gill-man Abe Sapien (Jones again, obviously). Even Seth MacFarlane impresses as the team's new recruit, a hyper-proper German protoplasmic cloud (yep, you read that right) who doesn't take too kindly to Hellboy's freewheeling ways. The Golden Army ended on a fairly irresistible cliffhanger, and here's where I get really irritated. Even though the film netted a modest profit, Universal declined to finance a follow-up (we're now getting a Del Toro-and-Perlman-free reboot from Neil Marshall and David Harbour). Credit Hollywood's poor short-term memory in the wake of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, as well as the financial expectations those two features established where modest would always prove less desirable than massive. Still, Hellboy II: The Golden Army has retained so much of its charm. Here's hoping this reissue helps the film pick up some new admirers.