Imaginative Hellboy II a Lot of Fun
Now this is more like it.
The Angel of Death (Doug Jones) awakens in Universal Pictures' Hellboy II: The Golden Army
I was not hugely impressed with writer and director Guillermo del Toro's 2004 visually audacious epic Hellboy. There were some great moments and ideas, all of it cemented by a spectacularly beguiling and self-effacing turn by veteran character actor Ron Perlman, but overall I found the film to be more than a bit tired and, ultimately, really kind of tedious.
But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t curious what the filmmaker had up his sleeve for a follow up. Based on the cult success (and pretty fantastic DVD sales), Universal decided to roll the dice and finance a sequel, this time allowing del Toro more freedom and creative control to dive headfirst into his massively creative imagination.
The result is that Hellboy II: The Golden Army is one of the more fantastical (and fantastically entertaining) adventures we’ve seen this whole Summer. Don’t get me wrong, this foray into the dark realms of monsters, mayhem and the occult is nothing more than a beefed-up B-movie, but as these sorts of things tend to go this one is a surprising amount of fun I just didn’t see coming.
This latest installment finds our devilish red-faced superhero Hellboy (still dynamically portrayed by Perlman) fighting the good fight alongside pyrotechnic girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and fish-faced best pal Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) for the trio’s acerbic bureaucratic boss Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor). Assisting them this time around is seemingly robotic protoplasmic mystic newcomer Johann Krauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), the whole team unprepared for the new enemy rising up beneath them to challenge the human race for supremacy of the Earth.
What has happened is that the pale-faced Prince Nuada (Luke Gross) has usurped his father’s throne and broken the ancient truce with humankind, seeking to activate a mystical and indestructible fighting force known as the Golden Army. With time running out, and with the assistance of the ruler’s twin sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), Hellboy and company must descend into the bowels of the planet in order to stop a war guaranteed to bring death and destruction the likes of which no being has ever known before.
What I love about del Toro is that spectacle isn’t the end all-be all behind the equation. At its heart, Hellboy II isn’t an action epic or a fantasy-adventure but instead a touching saga of relationships, of what it sometimes means to truly give your heart – every last bit of it – to the one you love, consequences be damned. For all their unique weirdness, this is a movie about people and what it means to be human, these characters as everyday normal as you, me or that guy riding right past you on his bicycle.
Not that the director doesn’t unleash some glorious bits of carnage. There’s a wonderful fight in an imaginative little place called the Troll Market that’s one heck of a lot of fun, while Hellboy’s attempts to protect a newborn baby from an otherworldly Earth God (much like the one at the center of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke) is downright sensational. I also was perfectly flabbergasted by the demon and Liz’s encounter with a majestically menacing creature called the Angel of Death, the scene a chilling portent of things to come if del Toro decides to continue this franchise onward.
Still, unlike the filmmaker’s triumphs The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth much of this is awfully slight, none of it really going in a direction I didn’t fully anticipate. I also have to say that del Toro and co-writer (and creator of the original Dark Horse comic book) Mike Mignola make a major mistake, Sapien engaging in some dubious decision making made moot thanks to a pivotal scene occuring just seconds before. Additionally, like the first film, this one relies upon way too much CGI in the final moments, the whole thing turning into a gigantic computer animated mess that’s difficult to keep track of.
None of this matters quite like it probably should, though, and thanks to Perlman and Gross (who deserves way more screen time then he ultimately gets) theirs is a physical and moralistic battle resonating far beyond the usual fisticuffs. Most of all, though, Hellboy II: The Golden Army is just plain old good-fashioned imaginatively realized fun. For that, del Toro hasn’t just made me happy, he’s nearly made me ecstatic, and I didn’t even have to sell my soul to the Devil to get it.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
