Post by BIGFANBOY on Aug 8, 2008 5:43:45 GMT -5
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY
Review by Gary Dean Murray
The first Hellboy was a big hit four years ago, a surprise to both the studio and filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro. In the years that followed, Del Toro gave us one of the biggest foreign language fantasy films of all-time - Pan’s Labyrinth. Now, with Hellboy II: The Golden Army he tries to capture lighting twice and mostly fails.
This film starts out years ago with Professor Broom (John Hurt) reading to Hellboy (as a young boy) a bedtime story about a time of man and magical creatures. The king of the magical creatures had a golden army, used it only once, and in seeing how bad it was made a pact with man never to use that mechanical army again. He divides the crown that controls the army into three pieces so that no one can put them back together.
Flash-forward to today and things are not perfect in the world of Hellboy. He and his lady love, the flame throwing Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), seem to be fighting all the time. And the other member of the team, fish-boy Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), is just a lonely lost soul swimming in a fish bowl year after year. On the other side of the plot, the story that the Professor had told Hellboy seems to be true, because Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) is trying to put together the three parts of the crown in order to command the golden army, with his twin sister trying to stop him.
In our first big set piece, Prince Nuada releases a bunch of tooth fairies to help in his mayhem. That’s right, tooth fairies - little beasts that feast on bones and teeth. Our heroes get to battle this little army of pests and then a beast right out of 20,000 Fathoms, which then turns Hellboy and the rest of the Paranormal Fighting Force into media heroes. But HB finds that being famous isn’t quite what he expected.
A new leader is sent to ride rough shot over this group, a mist of energy (voice by Family Guy creative force Seth MacFarlane). He figures that they need to find out where the fairies came from which leads them to a Troll Marketplace. This film now should have been called "Hellboy Potter and the Mystery of the Golden Army". All this leads to the pieces of the crown and an epic battle between the forces of good and evil.
A film like this is not so much about plot but as it is about action. There are some giant pieces of action throughout the flick so it will keep the comic fans interested, but the actual plot meanders a bit too much. It's as if the creative team had some good ideas for the big moments and just made up a bunch of stuff to link them together. But the sword skills and battles rival Crouching Tiger in their scope. We get face huggers ala Alien, a reference to Bride of Frankenstein, and the aforementioned Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. It is a hodgepodge of cinematic references. The cast doesn’t seem that interested in their roles. Ron Perlman looks bored this time as Hellboy, his smirk not as disdainful. All he does is bellow his lines, there is no subtly in his work. Selma Blair doesn’t come across as a lost soul but as a hacked off woman. What is gone in her performance here is the melancholy concerning her existence, her want to fit into one world while being forced into another. On the plus side Luke Goss does a superb job as a villain. It takes an over-the-top performance to battle a demon from the underworld, and he does come across as someone who actually has a chance to defeat our hero.
Since Del Toro wrote and directed this little excursion into fantasy, he has to take most of the blame for its disjointed nature. In the first film all he had to do was establish a group of characters and give them a little adventure. Now, he has to give the audience more and he goes off the deep end almost into Pan’s world. I think that the entire exercise comes across as a bit witless. For a summer flick Hellboy II is entertaining. But as a bit of cinema, it is lacking those elements to make it great. Out of our three Hollywood comic book films for 2008 so far, this is a distant third.
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