Director Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 Hellboy was a solid, respectable effort that nevertheless felt a bit flat, and underperformed at the box office; the film dealt mostly with the resurrected son-of-the-Devil’s attempts to adjust to the real world and fit in at the secretive Bureau of paranormal research.
Fast-forward 4 years, and with the origin story taken care of, Hellboy II: The Golden Army compensates for what was missing in the first film and then some by throwing a bevy of monsters at us left and right: a kingdom of mythical creatures, men in rubber suits, a giant green plant thing, and oh yeah, that titular Golden Army, which is a lot more menacing than it sounds.
While missing the emotional resonance of del Toro’s best work (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth), Hellboy II is a whole lotta fun.
An overlong prologue brings back Professor Bruttenholm (John Hurt), who narrates a story to a young Hellboy about the truce between human and fantasy worlds, and the mythical and all-powerful Golden Army that lies in a slumber and could doom mankind if awoken.
Flash-forward to present(?)-day and what do you imagine might happen? While Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is investigating paranormal occurrences at the Bureau of Paranormal Research with his sidekicks Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), there’s a revolt in the mythical world as Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) launches an attack on humanity.
Hellboy and team investigate the mythical world – which includes the highlight of the film, an extended troll market sequence – and come to discover Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), who wants to protect humanity from her brother.
I was overjoyed with the special effects in the film, which include a prevalence of make-up effects, prosthetics, and men in rubber suits. Too often films are concerned with convincing us of things we know can’t be real, using computer effects that may never be capable of doing that.
How well will a film like The Incredible Hulk hold up, with its main character created using CGI that may be passé in 10 years? Certainly, there’s no shortage of computer graphics in Hellboy II, but they’re used sparingly and effectively.
I know that isn’t a real monster on the screen no matter what effects are used to create it, but I get a lot of satisfaction knowing that there’s a real presence behind it, when it has that real-world weight that CGI simply cannot create. This film delivers that satisfaction in spades.
I wish the story were a bit tighter. The film is never truly compelling, and there’s never that overwhelming sense of doom that should come with the potential end of the world.
But maybe that’s too much to expect from a film like this. It’s unfortunate that Hellboy II has come out in the summer of The Dark Knight, a perfectly good comic book movie forced to stand up next to one that revolutionizes the genre.
Cast is well-suited to the material: Perlman is, again, perfectly cast (and one of the few actors who can remain recognizable under mounds of makeup), Jones is terrific as Abe Sapien, and Seth MacFarlane (TV’s Family Guy) is clearly having a lot of fun providing the over-the-top German-accented voice to Hellboy’s new supervisor, Johann Krauss. Blair is a little bland as Liz Sherman, but she has little to do here other than providing a love interest for the main character.
While the original Hellboy was shot in Prague, this one split time between London and Budapest.
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