Hellboy II - The Golden Army
Dir. Guillermo del Toro, feat Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Luke Goss, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hurt, Anna Walton, Seth MacFarlane (M)
By Nigel Floyd
Guillermo del Toro's fairytale is not so much a sequel as a fusion of the fabulist imagination of Pan's Labyrinth with the witty, irreverent comic-book action of his own Hellboy. Virtually a stand-alone film, it pitches the red-skinned, devil-horned Hellboy headlong into a mythical clash between his adopted human world and an ancient underworld of elves, fairies and trolls.
The plot concerns the plans of usurped King Balor's son, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), to awaken the dormant Golden Army, pitiless clockwork uber-warriors commissioned and later mothballed by his horrified father. To prevent this, the prince's twin sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) elicits the help of Hellboy, his pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair), aquatic empath Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and a newcomer to the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence, Johann Kraus.
Perfectly cast, Ron Perlman plays Hellboy as an anti-superhero, a blue-collar guy who is happier chugging beers and eating pizza than fighting evil. The fanboy indulgence of the spectacular action scenes sometimes arrests the plot's forward momentum, but what del Toro calls "the bloodline of moral choice" runs through the richly imagined story like a scarlet thread. Crucially, no distinction is made between the humans, the tame ‘monsters' of the BPRD and the glamorous ‘freaks' they are charged with policing. All are capable of the whole gamut of human emotions. A thinking person's ‘creature feature', Hellboy II is also a heartfelt plea for bio- and cultural diversity.
Read Time Out's interview with the Director of Hellboy II Guillermo del Toro