: 3 reels out of 52008 - Guillermo Del Toro, dir.
Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones
1 hour, 50 minutes
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and some language.
SPOILER ALERT
I went into Hellboy II wanting - and expecting - to like it. The previews all looked topnotch. I loved the first installment. Although I had not read the comics on which it was based (and still haven't), that kind of supernatural superhero tale is right up my alley.
The main characters are great! Hellboy (Perlman) - the "Right Hand of Doom" as he's described in the first movie. Big, red, loud, with an attitude to match. Abe (one of 3 characters portrayed by Jones) - the cerebral psychic fish-man. The brains of the operation. And Liz (Blair) - now a fully-integrated member of the team - the hot chick (quite literally - she has pyrokinetic abilities). Number II adds a new team member - ostensibly the leader - in Johann Krauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), a mysterious ghostly presence inhabiting a retro spacesuit.
Anyway, I liked Hellboy II, but I didn't love it. The reality didn't quite match up to the anticipation for me.
This time, the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense team is pitted against Nuada (Luke Goss), a rogue Elf prince, determined to unleash the fabled indestructible Golden Army of magical robots and wipe out the human race. To accomplish this feat, he must collect three pieces of a magical crown.
He grabs the first piece - and alerts the BPRD - by raiding an auction house where it is up for sale and wiping out its crowd of patrons.
In order to track him down, the BPRD infiltrate the Troll Market (the entrance is under the Brooklyn Bridge) and meet up with Nuada's twin sister Nuala (Anna Walton). Nuala doesn't share her brother's hatred for humanity and cooperates with Hellboy's team, especially with Abe, who shares her psychic ability; the two develop kind of a star-crossed love through the course of the movie.
Speaking of love, there's more development in the relationship between Hellboy and Liz. Liz is having second thoughts, Hellboy is being rather bachelor-ish (read "slobby"), and to top it off, Abe psychically detects Liz's unknown pregnancy (which she confirms with about a dozen home pregnancy tests).
But when Nuada mortally wounds Hellboy, the team comes together to cure him and whip Nuada's megalomaniacal butt.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
But not great stuff. Some things that bugged me:
1) In several scenes, Hellboy looked incredibly out of shape. It was weird - instead of the huge bulky guy from the first movie, he had a huge head and a skinny body. But only in some scenes! I don't know what was up with that, but it was really disconcerting to me.
2) The normal human BPRD agents were nothing but redshirts. They all died in the first fight. Yeah, I know the emphasis is on the superheroes, but this was ridiculous. It was like these highly-trained government agents were only there to show how terrible these tiny piranha-like creatures (TOOTH FAIRIES! I kid you not) were. I think we might have gotten the idea by the state of the auction house: where once there was a bustling crowd, now there was just a floor coated three inches deep in sticky pink goo.
3) The way they defeat the Golden Army seems a bit inconsistent to me. Like I said, I haven't read the comics, but (watch out, major spoiler!) for Red to play on his identity as a demon prince, to claim "royal" blood for the right to challenge for control of the Army, just seems out of character. To me it was pretty clear at the end of Hellboy (1) that he had decided not to be that hellspawn anymore. He broke off his horns and surrendered his fiery crown! He regularly files his horns to trademark round stumps. I just don't think he would have come up with the cunning plan to say "Hey, by the way, I'm a demon prince and I challenge you for control of this Golden Army thing"!
Those might seem like minor quibbles, and to some extent they are. Overall, I'd say Hellboy was a little too whiny in this episode, Abe was a little too lovelorn (the scene where he's listening to love songs in the library is pure cheese), and Liz was a little too frantically neurotic.
It was a good, solid flick, but it didn't have the magic, for me, that the first did.
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