Hellboy II: The Golden Army

July 11, 2008

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 110 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Hellboy is back, and this time he’s facing denizens of a new monster manual. Evil elves, trolls, killer tooth faeries, clockwork magical robots, and giant forest elementals threaten humanity.

As we saw in the first movie, Hellboy is a demon-spawn brought through a dimensional gateway during a World War II Nazi experiment as an infant. But the U.S. Army got a hold of him, and he was adopted by a loving human father and raised to be one of the good guys. Now, 60+ years later (he ages slower than humans), he works for a Men In Black-style organization, the B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense). As his foster father says in the first movie, “There are things that go bump in the night. We are the ones who bump back.”

Hellboy 2: The Golden ArmyHellboy (Ron Perlman) has his motley crew: his human girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair), who has pyrokinetic powers, and Atlantis-survivor fishman Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, The Silver Surfer in FANTASTIC FOUR 2). This time out they get a new leader, Johann Kraus (Voiced by FAMILY GUY’s Seth McFarlane), who has a case of the vapors and doesn’t get along well with Hellboy.

It turns out at the dawn of time humans warred with elves. These aren’t your Tolkien elves, though (And they look a little like the Wraith in STARGATE ATLANTIS) . They have a magical robot army that’s been in storage, consisting of 4900 ostensibly indestructable robots. The son of the elf king wants to crank them up and give humanity an ass-whuppin’. Hellboy begs to differ.

This is based on the comics written and drawn by Mike Mignola (who also did THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD). It’s directed by Guillermo del Toro, who also did an interesting 1993 vampire movie CRONOS, MIMIC, BLADE II, the first HELLBOY, PAN’S LABYRINTH, and has both a DOCTOR STRANGE movie and THE HOBBIT in the works.

PAN’S LABYRINTH was a big influence on this sequel; the look of the creatures and the underworld is along the lines of that movie. It’s a visual feast. The Troll’s Market feels a bit like Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s too much of a good thing; the director has thrown in everything but the troll kitchen sink, and the pace of the movie is sometimes sluggish due to all the visuals.

The pals of Hellboy, Liz and Abe, get a lot of nice character moments. Liz is finding the trials and tribulations of dating Hellboy; Abe strikes up a romance with an elf babe and twin sister of the bad guy. I haven’t read the comics, but I suspect if you’re a big fan of the comics, you’ll really like all the character moments. But again sometimes this comes as the expense of the pacing of the film; this at times seems more like a DVD “Director’s Cut.” Maybe after the critical raves for PAN’S LABYRINTH nobody felt they could tell del Toro to trim some scenes.

Still, Hellboy gets to kick a lot of monster butt, and it’s a fun ride.

Posted by Mack Guffin | Filed Under 3 Stars, Action, Doug Jones, Ron Perlman, SciFi, Selma Blair, Seth McFarlane, Theatrical 

Seen it? How many stars do you give it?

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (5 votes, average: 4.8 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

Comments

2 Responses to “Hellboy II: The Golden Army”

  1. Mack Guffin on July 11th, 2008 10:18 am

    And here’s a trailer for HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY on YouTube.

  2. Mack Guffin on July 18th, 2008 9:24 pm

    And now, a little video clip of Hellboy Inside The Actors Studio!

Got something to say?

You must be logged in to post a comment.