Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a review by Jon
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
3 out of 5
From the visionary director of Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy II: The Golden Army takes you into fantastical worlds with imaginative creatures and thrilling fight sequences unlike anything you've ever seen before!That overview is taken from the cover and unfortunately reveals more of the film than it may appear. Hellboy II is rather lazy overall and if not a cash-in, lacks the drive of the first film. I've always enjoyed Del Toro's "one for me, one for you" approach, but I'm not sure who this one was for exactly.
I likened Hellboy to a sitcom in certain moments and that was a good thing, humanizing the fantastic characters. Here it is even more like a sitcom and not in a good way. It's the One where Hellboy gets drunk! It's the One where he argues with Liz! It is funny and entertaining, but there's none of the weight the first one had. Still, this is the role Ron Perlman surely looks forward to the most because he is brilliant. Doug Jones takes full control of Abe (amongst others!) this time around for an expanded role and the relationship with Hellboy is great.
Maybe it would have still worked had the overall plot not have been so massive. For those of you who need more than the cover offers, it concerns a prince of the Underworld (Luke Goss) declaring war on our world and it's up to the paranormal team to stop it. As I said, big stuff, but crucially, it doesn't centre on Big Red like the first one did. In fact, there's an obvious plot-line where he is poisoned and this seems like a shoe-horned in attempt at bringing him in direct line of the main story.
If the set-piece nature of the story is less subtle this time around with half-arsed links between the fights, then at least those set-pieces are marvellous fun, especially the market place and the swarm. Plus the banter, sitcom or not, is very assured and funny. Johann is particularly brilliant and the all-too human agent from the first movie is missing, so we're fully immersed in fantasy land and it works better for it. Plus that makes Jeffrey Tambor's long-suffering boss even funnier. Luke Goss might feel like the odd-one out, but he is excellent, building on his superb performance in Del Toro's Blade II and it's a log way since Bros!
Roger Corman famously hijacked sets that were due to be demolished to churn out very fast b-movies. I can't help feel Del Toro has done the digital equivalent and found a bunch of models he forgot to use in Pan's Labyrinth and has cobbled together a sequel. Still, I can't quite be that cynical as there is too much evidence that he still has a great deal of love for the character and that does come through the screen, making for a wonderful piece of escapism at least. It's still much better than most of his peers. Perhaps it's fairer to say that after Pan's, he got a bit carried away and over-confident and forgot to make sure the central plot was rock solid.
(From Jon's Marathon of Horror! 2009 on November 1st, 2009)
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May 15, 2024, 12:36:42 PM
