Hellboy II: The Golden Army

My first introduction to director Guillermo del Toro was Blade II,
a film that surprised me and endeared to me greatly, I much preferred it to the first film. It's odd, but there's something I really hate about vampires that just 'poof' into dust, so when del Toro came along and gave us a film where the antagonists were so much more scary, imaginative and quite a challenge for the hero to dispatch, I loved it.

After watching The Devil's Backbone, one of the most fantastic ghost stories I've ever seen, it seemed that del Toro was indeed a director to watch closely. After Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth, he cemented himself in my estimation as one of the best directors working today. Some people simply don't get the appeal, but if you've seen any interviews with him, it's clear that del Toro has an affinity with monsters and creatures of folklore, and that's something that greatly strikes a chord with my own imagination.

When he did the first Hellboy, I was already familiar with Mike Mignola's work, and the world of Hellboy and the BPRD was also something that struck a chord with me. It was a pulpish monster hunt, steeped in mythology and Lovecraftian flourishes, and the film captured everything that made the comic so unique and interesting, it's possibly the best adaptation of a comic so far. Everything about it, from the atmosphere and characters to the pacing was just spot-on for me.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army opens up with a fantastic scene, where a young Hellboy is being told a bedtime story by his adoptive father Professor Bruttenholm (John Hurt), and as Hellboy has just watched Howdy Doody on TV, the entire story plays out in his imagination as depicted by puppets! It's such a wonderfully quirky and imaginative opening, and it had me grinning from ear to ear.

From the opening, there's a tone of mythology set up and there's a whole other world opened up in this film that we've not seen in the comics. While the first film had some plot details that were very close to the source material, Hellboy II has no reference points to Mignola's canon. It's certainly a more original work than the previous film, and both del Toro and Mignola have really gone to work to flesh out the various creatures that inhabit the world of Hellboy, some frightening, some magnificent and some hilarious. Keep an eye out for the Irish goblin who sports an actual Irish accent, rather than the usual Hollywood diddley-eye leprechaun accent.

The good guy roster has been beefed up a bit also, as they've brought over Johann Krauss from Mignola's BPRD series. In this version, Krauss isn't the quiet spoken new guy, but rather a self-assured and arrogant expert who's put in charge of the team, and his professionalism really grates against Hellboy. He provides some of the funniest scenes of the film as well, such as the locker room altercation.

Now, as great a film that Hellboy II is, it's quite flawed and I definitely think that it's inferior to the first. For one, the character of Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) seems to have completely changed from the hard-ass in the first movie, to a rather pathetic comic relief character that just isn't funny. In the comic books, he thought it was a great idea to place a bomb inside one of his own agents for assurances. Manning was a rather dark person, and represented quite a nasty side of the BPRD, but here he seems like a doddering old fool.

There's some parts of the plot towards the end that really doesn't make any kind of logical sense, and I won't spoil anything, but I do wish that Guillermo del Toro worked a little more on the script for this one, because it really had the potential to surpass the original. The overly cheesy ending really annoyed me too, and because of little things like that, it feels like a slightly stunted experience.

Don't get me wrong, I really loved Hellboy II, it was just a fantastically enjoyable and imaginative film and along with The Dark Knight and Iron Man, I don't think I've ever enjoyed myself in the cinema as much as I have this year. Great film, and I'm seriously looking forward to a third Hellboy, but still not as good as the first.