THIS JERK SAYS

So it’s been a few weeks since my last review, and I’ve fallen a bit behind in the summer movie season.  I still have yet to see The Hulk or Hancock, or a good number of far less interesting movies.  However, I did get around to catching Guillermo Del Toro’s return to the superhero genre, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.  So, how does the Big Red stack up in the increasingly huge landscape of cape-and-tights movies?

PLOT:

Hellboy, a demon sent to bring about the apocalypse but really doesn’t want to, isn’t too happy about having to be kept a secret by the B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense), and longs to live a normal life with all the regular non-monster people.  This is complicated not only by the fact that he’s a big red devil, but also that his pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz is pregnant and doesn’t know how to break it to him.

It’s complicated a wee bit further when an evil prince from the forgotten kingdom of elves declares war on the human world, and seeks to resurrect a golden army of indestructible mechanical soldiers.  So it’s up to Hellboy, Liz, their fish-man partner Abe, and an ectoplasmic German named Johann to do what they do best: kick ass and save the world.  Yee-haw.

STYLE:

Like in the first one, del Toro combines a lot of action with some pretty good comedy, though a lot of the horror elements are now downplayed a good bit.  In place of the Cthuloid doomsday creatures is a hidden world of old magic, filled with crazy-looking trolls and all sorts of other creatures from the same designers of Pan’s Labyrinth.  Playing the CGI card only when absolutely impossible to do otherwise, the monsters are made that much cooler by the fact that they’re actually there.  Long story short, if they don’t get an Oscar for Best Make-up Effects, it’ll be a damned robbery.

ACTING:

There’s really no one else I can think of who could play Hellboy other than Ron Perlman–the guy’s just absolutely spot-on with him, even better than the first time around.  While I missed David Hyde Pierce’s voice as Abe Sapien, it was nice to see Doug Jones finally get to do his awesome suit-motion work and not have his voice dubbed over (he also plays the Chamberlain and the Angel of Death, who are freaking incredible but only show up briefly).  Jeffrey Tambor does a great job as the B.P.R.D. director and human doormat Tom Manning, though it was disappointing to see that he kind of gets shoved aside about a third of the way into the movie.  Rounding out the better parts of the cast is Seth MacFarlane, who provides the voice for Johann Krauss.

On the downside, Selma Blair came off really flat as Liz, though that might be because she was trying to be the ‘human’ anchor to the two cartoony-looking monster folks she works with.  And I know that mystically-enlightened folks are supposed to sound detached and whatnot, but Luke Goss and Anna Walton felt like they were just sleepwalking through their roles (particularly Goss) as Prince Nuada and Princess Nuala.  I can’t tell if that was intentional, or just bad acting, but it really started to get grating after a while.

ACTION/VIOLENCE:

There are some pretty awesome sequences throughout the movie, as Big Red and company take on a swarm of tooth-fairies (who are nowhere near as nice as the name sounds), punch trolls just for the sheer heck of it, save New York from a gigantic plant elemental, and slug it out with the ‘industrable’ Golden Army.  Those fights are all a hoot and a half, but whenever Prince Nuada gets into the fray with his embarassingly obvious fast-forward wire-fu, it has the exact opposite effect of what they intended.  Sorry guys, but Ray Park he ain’t.

ROMANCE/T&A:

The relationships between Hellboy and Liz (and later, Abe and Nuala) actually work a lot better when they’re not interacting with each other.  That sounds cynical, I know, but I actually got a lot more from the scene where Hellboy and Abe are throwing back brews, commiserating over their respective women troubles, than I did from the scenes when they’re together.  Also, Selma Blair is still really easy on the eyes, especially for someone who’s supposed to be having a kid in-character.

FAITHFULNESS TO THE ORIGINAL:

The first Hellboy took a lot of liberties by adding in a whole new character (who was written out of the sequel), inventing the love sub-plot between Hellboy and Liz, and by changing the look and origin of the Ogdru Jahad, but was still more or less a straight adaptation of the stories Wake the Devil and Conqueror Worm.  This one, on the other hand, was made completely from scratch, and for the most part it still felt pretty right.  I did kinda miss the way the world of magic was portrayed in Mignola’s comic (especially since the mincing elf prince Nuada could just as easily be replaced with the much cooler pig-demon Gruagach), but Del Toro’s own version works well enough.

In keeping to terms of characterization, they’re still absolutely dead-on.  Hellboy acts like Hellboy, Abe acts like Abe, and all is right with the world.

GRIPES:

I could never get into the villain this time around, which is disappointing since he takes up an awful lot of screen-time.  It felt at times like Del Toro had a plot for a whole other movie, then decided to throw Hellboy in later.  Gone is the sense of apocalyptic dread from the comics and the first movie, replaced instead by an “aww, it’s sad that nobody believes in magic” sort of message which would be fine if we were supposed to sympathize with Nuada, but he’s the villain, and Hellboy’s more fun anyway.

OVERALL:

If you see one superhero movie this year, see The Dark Knight.  If you see two, see that and Iron Man.  But if you see three, you could do worse than seeing Hellboy II.  It has the feel of a spiritual successor to Ghostbusters, being funny when it wants to be, and kickass when it needs to be.  While there are a few flat moments, it’s still a good time to be had, and if this weren’t already a banner year for awesome hero movies, it’d probably be getting a lot more attention.

This jerk’s thumb….is UP.