Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Of all the comic book movies that have spun out of theaters this long and pulpy summer, Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" is the most unapologetically comic book-y.
Thank goodness. No ironic Hollywood stars, no weighty character neuroses, no mid-movie dramatic twists sinking the fun like an anchor. "Hellboy II" is the anti-"Hancock," a blast of fanboy wit, style, imagination, and prodigious noise that comes on like heavy-bore pop art. Better, its title character is to mainstream heroes like Batman and Spider-Man what publisher Dark Horse Comics is to DC and Marvel: a scruffy, cigar-chomping upstart.
You don't need to have read the comics or seen 2004's "Hellboy" to play along, but here's the FAQ: Hellboy - actor Ron Perlman under a ton of glazed-ham makeup - is a demon raised from childhood by humans and currently employed by the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. (It's supposed to be top secret, but Hellboy has a bad habit of turning up on YouTube.)
He's short-tempered and sardonic but basically a good sort, keeping his horns sawed off and sharing quarters with girlfriend/human torch Liz (Selma Blair) and an aquatic empath - sort of a Creature From the Psychic Friends Network - named Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). Their job is to keep the occult legions (goblins, trolls, balrogs, you name it) from infesting the human world.
The elves, apparently, have had enough of this nonsense. The Kabuki-face Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) overthrows his father (Roy Dotrice) and embarks on a campaign to unleash a crew of unstoppable battle-bots called the Golden Army on mankind. Our heroes are called on to foil him, if Hellboy and Liz can stop arguing about his pet cats overrunning their apartment.
It all sounds terribly silly, and it all plays like a charm, because the cast stays in the spirit (tongue-in-cheek but committed), and because del Toro lets his inner comics-freak rip. The Mexican-born director hit the big time with 2006's "Pan's Labyrinth," but he has always balanced his art-house side ("The Devil's Backbone") with gonzo genre work ("Blade II"), and here the two come close to blending entirely.
If you've seen "Pan's Labyrinth," you'll recognize the visual design of the various nasties in "Hellboy" as the product of del Toro's brain and sketchpad: weathered faces lacking eyes, molting wings with eyes, a gargoyle who has a miniature cathedral growing out of his head. There are tooth fairies, but you'd better pray they don't get anywhere near the children.
In one scene a gargantuan, plant-like "elemental" stalks lower Manhattan, towering over the buildings like Hieronymus Bosch's rethink of the Jolly Green Giant. When it's wounded, flowers and moss spring up from its blood - a touch of unexpected lyricism amidst the mayhem.
Indeed, you may wonder whose side del Toro and his co-writer, "Hellboy" creator Mike Mignola, are on. The hero's job is to protect us helpless humans, but next to the elves and other eldritch beings, we're made to look puny and small-minded, turning on the big fella with mob fury in one scene. It's not pretty. Worse, it's not very believable.
"Hellboy" thankfully pulls back before he starts mewling like Peter Parker. Blair's Liz, though, has less to do than in the first film and more emotional water to carry, and the actress doesn't look too happy about it. "Hellboy" is more successful at building a romance between Abe and the villain's twin sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton); they're two delicate souls carving out a quiet space (complete with Tennyson verse) between the crashes and ka-booms.
Another character I wish we'd seen more of is Johann Krauss, a German paranormal specialist imported by the BPRD to keep Hellboy on a leash. He turns out to be a psychopathic gas - a ghost - inside a diving suit, and he looks for all the world like Darth Vader without a head. Two actors, John Alexander and James Dodd, are credited with his physical movements, but the persnickety Teutonic voice comes from Seth MacFarlane of "Family Guy," who gives the rivalry between retentive Krauss and explosive Hellboy the topspin of classic vaudeville patter.
"Hellboy II" is bigger, louder, and a smidgen more mainstream than the first movie, and I expect hard-core fans of the comic won't like it as much. There are signs of tired sequelitis in the personal dilemma Liz faces halfway through, in Jeffrey Tambor's officious BPRD bureaucrat, and in the way the clanky plot outstrips the wit in the final scenes.
The movie's rescued time and again, though, by the soulful swagger of Perlman's performance - he plays Hellboy like a smarter Thing or a fully self-actualized Hulk - and by del Toro's flair for the baroque. The filmmaker loves the tatty pop energy of comic books, their speech-balloon dialogue and muscular sense of fantasy. He knows that on the page, as on the screen, you can draw anything and make it spring madly to life.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movienation.
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