CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 7/11/08

Hellboy Takes the Silver This Time

By peter clines

Earth's favorite reformed demon prince is back and still keeping the world safe from things that go bump in the night. He's still big, red, and carrying firepower that makes the Punisher weak in the knees. This time, though, the overconfident Hellboy may have bitten off a bit more than he can chew in a sequel that comes across as…well, a sequel.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro
Story by Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola
Based on the comic book by Mike Mignola

The renegade demon called Anung un Rama, the Right Hand of Doom, better known as Hellboy (Ron Perlman), is right where we left him, getting used to full-time life with his lady-love, Liz (Selma Blair), and fighting monsters with the rest of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. This time, their enemy is elven Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), who's decided to end the millennia-long truce between mankind and the faerie world by reactivating The Golden Army, a force of mystic automatons that once decimated humanity and led to the truce in the first place. As if that wasn't enough to deal with, Hellboy's earned himself an unusual new supervisor (v. by Seth Mac Farlane) after "accidentally" taking the BPRD public, his best friend Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) is completely smitten with Nuada's twin sister, Nuala (Anna Walton), and lately Liz has been getting really moody and sick in the morning…

Like the first film, the strength of the story by writer-director Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and original creator Mike Mignola is that it focuses a good deal of its energy on making the visually inhuman cast remarkably human. Hellboy may have a stone fist, ground-down horns, and a tail, but at his core he's no different than most of the folks you meet every day. He's a blue-collar guy who likes television and cigars, argues with his boss, and worries about what he did to annoy his girlfriend this time. Abe is a brilliant and insightful fish-man, but he turns into a stammering idiot whenever the princess enters the room. It's this basic humanity that lets them get away with cracking a few beers and singing along to Barry Manilow while they lament their love lives.

Of course, summer action movies can't get by just on clever musical numbers (and let's face it, most of them don't). When your first film is about Armageddon (this one, not that one), it's a bit tough to come up with a suitable threat for the sequel. But del Toro and Mignola have done a decent job with the character of Prince Nuada, a former outcast waging a very public war because his race was forced into hiding and then all but forgotten. There's a nice parallel between Nuada and Hellboy, two supernatural creatures forced to conceal their existence from the world, both determined to walk in the sun, and yet both wanting it for very different reasons. As our hero continues to fight off trolls, elementals, and tooth fairies (nowhere near as silly or funny as they sound), he comes to realize people are just as scared of him as the things he saves them from. Both men want their hidden worlds to be known, but both worlds only function well because they're hidden.

Alas, despite all this, the balance of the film is a bit off. While a picture is worth a thousand words, those thousand words aren't worth much if they're not part of your story. This time around, things are tipped towards del Toro's imagery rather than Mignola's characters. We're treated to dozens of stunning monsters and machines, but a good number do nothing to advance the plot, which ends up feeling stretched thin over 110 minutes. While it's fun to look at, there are just too many scenes that feel drawn out as we're shown another view of the latest cool beastie. As a result, many of the character plotlines are glossed over, such as the telepathic love between Abe and Princess Nuala, which ends up feeling forced instead of fascinating. It's never enough to fully unbalance the film, but it's a tilt that's hard not to notice. Each story element cries for more attention, maybe just a thousand words or so focused specifically on that one point, or even a mere dialogue polish to take the "sequel" edge off many of the lines.

Hellboy II has a good story, but it's well-apparent that the emphasis here was on making stunning visuals rather than a stunning screenplay. While the numerous inhabitants of the Elven Court and the Goblin Market catch the eye, they don't do much else. It's a definite sequel script, but still stronger than a lot of things that pass as sequels these days.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Universal Studios
Rated PG-13; 110 min.

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Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army courtesy Universal Studios

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