Hellboy 2:  The Golden Army (12A)

Dir. Guillermo del Toro, US/Germany, 2008, 120 mins

Cast: Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones

Review by Carol Allen

Mexican born del Toro is a remarkable director, in that he is a star of the art movie market with his Spanish language features such as Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and the Oscar winning Pan’s Labyrinth, while bringing the same brilliant creativity to Hollywood movies such as Mimi, Blade II and now his second Hellboy movie.  And as this latest one demonstrates, del Toro’s visual imagination and that of his design and cinematography team just gets richer and richer.  

Hellboy (Perlman) is a fiend from hell brought to earth by the Nazis, rescued and reformed by benevolent scientist Dr Trevor Broom (John Hurt) and recruited by the top secret Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence, created by Roosevelt in 1943 to fight the good fight against violent supernatural forces. The Golden Army that BPRD is taking on in this movie is that of Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), the white faced, flaxen haired and very acrobatic leader of the forest people, the original inhabitants of the Earth, who rebels against his people’s centuries’ old deference to humans and aims to reclaim the world for all magical creatures like his own. And even though he’s the villain of the piece, you may well think he has a point in fighting back against a race, which is destroying the forest habitat of his kind in order to build shopping malls!

The movie is primarily a glorious visual spectacle, which also has a terrific sense of humour. To hum the visual effects first, the story kicks off as Broom tells young Hellboy a bedtime story about how humanity first conquered the forest people’s Golden Army, which we see enacted by wooden puppet figures. Other highlights include flesh-eating Gremlin like insects, who attack Hellboy and his chums;  the bizarre creatures in the Troll market which our heroes pass through on their quest; a literally legless leprechaun, who helps them and a particularly spectacular sequence, where the forest god is spreading his tentacles over Manhattan, as he does battle with Hellboy. They are beautiful, grotesque, imaginative and sometimes violent moving pictures, totally seamless in terms of live action and computer generated effects and they make for great cinema. 

As to the characters, Hellboy himself is both lovable and very funny. With his red skin and truncated horns, in manner and appearance he reminds one of a Philadelphia steel worker with goggles on his head, a bad case of sunburn and an inexplicable tail, forever chomping away on his cigar. Jones, the great British mime artist who was so scary in Pan’s Labyrinth plays Abe the aquatic empath, another of the other worldly creatures working for BPRD. With his fussy manner and dapper  English accent, he’s reminiscent of C-3PO from Star Wars. There’s a delightful scene, where Abe and Hellboy get drunk together and launch into inebriated song about the problems of their love lives. Blair as Hellboy’s pyrokinetic girlfriend doesn’t have an awful lot to do except burst into flames periodically but she does it well and Jeffrey Tambor is amusing as the BPRD bureaucrat, who can’t control the latest addition to the team, control freak Johann Krauss (John Alexander), who appears to be made up of smoke in a diving suit.  

If you’re going to be picky, the timeline of the film is a little inconsistent, in that Hellboy, born in 1944, is a boy in the 50s, the artifacts of his adult environment such as television sets look vintage 60s, yet there are contemporary references to YouTube in the dialogue, which would make our boy an old man.   It’s also a bit tricky to keep up with some of the machinations of the plot. But what the Hellboy, it’s a fantasy story set in a fantasy world and such a rich visual feast of a movie that normal logic is irrelevant.   Just sit back and enjoy.