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Hellboy II The Golden Army Review |
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Posted on
12:00 p.m. PST July 17, 2008 |
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff
07/11/2008
Of all the comic book movies that have spun out of theaters
this long and pulpy summer, Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy
II: The Golden Army" is the most unapologetically comic
book-y.
Thank goodness. No ironic Hollywood stars, no weighty
character neuroses, no mid-movie dramatic twists sinking
 the
fun like an anchor. "Hellboy II" is the anti-"Hancock," a
blast of fanboy wit, style, imagination, and prodigious
noise that comes on like heavy-bore pop art. Better, its
title character is to mainstream heroes like Batman and
Spider-Man what publisher Dark Horse Comics is to DC and
Marvel: a scruffy, cigar-chomping upstart.
You don't need to have read the comics or seen 2004's "Hellboy"
to play along, but here's the FAQ: Hellboy - actor Ron
Perlman under a ton of glazed-ham makeup - is a demon raised
from childhood by humans and currently employed by the
Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. (It's supposed
to be top secret, but Hellboy has a bad habit of turning up
on YouTube.)
He's short-tempered and sardonic but basically a good sort,
keeping his horns sawed off and sharing quarters with
girlfriend/human torch Liz (Selma Blair) and an aquatic
empath - sort of a Creature From the Psychic Friends Network
- named Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). Their job is to keep the
occult legions (goblins, trolls, balrogs, you name it) from
infesting the human world.
The elves, apparently, have had enough of this nonsense. The
Kabuki-face Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) overthrows his father
(Roy Dotrice) and embarks on a campaign to unleash a crew of
unstoppable battle-bots called the Golden Army on mankind.
Our heroes are called on to foil him, if Hellboy and Liz can
stop arguing about his pet cats overrunning their apartment.
It all sounds terribly silly, and it all plays like a charm,
because the cast stays in the spirit (tongue-in-cheek but
committed), and because del Toro lets his inner comics-freak
rip. The Mexican-born director hit the big time with 2006's
"Pan's Labyrinth," but he has always balanced his art-house
side ("The Devil's Backbone") with gonzo genre work ("Blade
II"), and here the two come close to blending entirely.
If you've seen "Pan's Labyrinth," you'll recognize the
visual design of the various nasties in "Hellboy" as the
product of del Toro's brain and sketchpad: weathered faces
lacking eyes, molting wings with eyes, a gargoyle who has a
miniature cathedral growing out of his head. There are tooth
fairies, but you'd better pray they don't get anywhere near
the children.
In one scene a gargantuan, plant-like "elemental" stalks
lower Manhattan, towering over the buildings like Hieronymus
Bosch's rethink of the Jolly Green Giant. When it's wounded,
flowers and moss spring up from its blood - a touch of
unexpected lyricism amidst the mayhem.
Indeed, you may wonder whose side del Toro and his
co-writer, "Hellboy" creator Mike Mignola, are on. The
hero's job is to protect us helpless humans, but next to the
elves and other eldritch beings, we're made to look puny and
small-minded, turning on the big fella with mob fury in one
scene. It's not pretty. Worse, it's not very believable.
"Hellboy" thankfully pulls back before he starts mewling
like Peter Parker. Blair's Liz, though, has less to do than
in the first film and more emotional water to carry, and the
actress doesn't look too happy about it. "Hellboy" is more
successful at building a romance between Abe and the
villain's twin sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton); they're
two delicate souls carving out a quiet space (complete with
Tennyson verse) between the crashes and ka-booms.
Another character I wish we'd seen more of is Johann Krauss,
a German paranormal specialist imported by the BPRD to keep
Hellboy on a leash. He turns out to be a psychopathic gas -
a ghost - inside a diving suit, and he looks for all the
world like Darth Vader without a head. Two actors, John
Alexander and James Dodd, are credited with his physical
movements, but the persnickety Teutonic voice comes from
Seth MacFarlane of "Family Guy," who gives the rivalry
between retentive Krauss and explosive Hellboy the topspin
of classic vaudeville patter.
"Hellboy II" is bigger, louder, and a smidgen more
mainstream than the first movie, and I expect hard-core fans
of the comic won't like it as much. There are signs of tired
sequelitis in the personal dilemma Liz faces halfway
through, in Jeffrey Tambor's officious BPRD bureaucrat, and
in the way the clanky plot outstrips the wit in the final
scenes.
The movie's rescued time and again, though, by the soulful
swagger of Perlman's performance - he plays Hellboy like a
smarter Thing or a fully self-actualized Hulk - and by del
Toro's flair for the baroque. The filmmaker loves the tatty
pop energy of comic books, their speech-balloon dialogue and
muscular sense of fantasy. He knows that on the page, as on
the screen, you can draw anything and make it spring madly
to life.
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