Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Looking Closer

Home
Religious Music & Entertainment
Film Forum and My Review of “Hellboy II: The Golden Army”

Film Forum and My Review of “Hellboy II: The Golden Army”

Last updated on: March 24, 2013 at 4:39 pm by Jeffrey Overstreet

Film Forum and My Review of “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” 2013-03-24T16:39:12-06:00 Jeffrey Overstreet

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

This is collection of reviews that I found interesting and helpful. The collection will be revised as I find more notable assessments online. Feel free to submit more reviews, or even your own, in the comments below.

HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY

With his newest fantasy, Guillermo Del Toro has earned a place at the table with Jim Henson, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and Hayao Miyazaki as one of the big screen’s most imaginative inventors of new worlds. Hellboy II: The Golden Army is far superior to Hellboy in many ways. In fact, it’s my favorite comic book movie of the year so far.

The villains in the first Hellboy film failed to be anything close to interesting, and Del Toro’s wild imagination seemed straitjacketed by studio contraints and genre conventions. By contrast, the villains in Hellboy 2 are interesting, even sympathetic — viewers should have no trouble understanding what motivates them.

The first Hellboy had a ruinous conclusion, borrowing the showdown from Men in Black, which was itself anticlimactic. The confrontation at the end of Hellboy II may end predictably, but it’s a dazzling spectacle.

Where the monstrous Hellboy and the handsomely gilled Abe Sapien stood out in a crowd as remarkable mutants in the first film, in Hellboy II we’re surprised when a typical human being shows up.

The bar has been raised for Halloween costume parties: Hellboy II is one of the greatest exhibitions of hand-crafted creatures ever to reach the screen. It’s too bad Stan Winston didn’t live to see it open, and that Jim Henson isn’t here to see the best display of animatronic genius since The Dark Crystal (a film that Hellboy II references more than once, from a mind-melding elfin female to the Garthim-like Golden Army).

And it’s saying something that the film’s two best scenes are almost asides: I won’t spoil them, but you’ll know the first has arrived when you see Hellboy standing at a wall of lockers, and the second when you hear the voice of Barry Manilow. (Trust me.) These two scenes may be the most uproariously funny in any of the last decade’s comic book hero features.

While Hellboy himself is a joy to watch, he doesn’t steal every scene like he did last time around. This time, the scene stealer is an “ectoplasmic mystic” named Professor Johann Kraus, a gaseous entity housed in the costume of a robot straight from an Ed Wood movie. Kraus, voiced by Seth MacFarlane, beats the snot out of another character in an action scene that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before. I love this character, and would happily follow him into his own spin-off.

The only disappointing aspect of Hellboy II for this viewer was the disappearance of David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe. Doug Jones, who fits so neatly into that amazing costume, provides Abe’s voice this time, and he does a fine job. But Pierce’s highly mannered voice was perfect for the character, and without him, Abe seems diminished. Too bad, because he has a bigger role to play this time around.

Del Toro obviously viewed this as a chance to see just how high he could reach, how far he could go as a choreographer of special effects mayhem. I’m sure the lessons he learned will serve him well when we go down, down, to goblin town in The Hobbit, and when the spiders run rampant and capture Bilbo’s dwarves in Mirkwood Forest. If this was Del Toro’s audition for a chance in Middle Earth, he would have passed with flying colors. With Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, he proved himself capable of powerful, profound storytelling. With Hellboy II, he proves that he can carry us away into worlds we never dreamed possible.

In spite of the film’s large cast of freaks and its almost-perpetual violence, we can still sense Del Toro’s gentle heartbeat, his sensitivity, in the characters’ conundrums. Prince Nuada, who claims leadership of an mythic underworld, commits a brutal murder at the beginning of the film in order to inherit power and support. But we quickly come to understand his compulsion. Just as the trees fight back in Shyamalan’s The Happening, so nature’s gods and all of the mysterious creatures of myth and spirit are going to unite and fight with Nuada against humanity’s oppression. Yes, this is another in a new surge of films emphasizing how it’s the world, not humankind, that needs to be saved. Neither the humans nor the villains seem interested in redeeming a fallen humanity–they seem stuck in a hopeless decline, fighting to preserve the magical and the beautiful.

In the real world, great works of myth and imagination are some of the most potent forces in fighting back against the tyranny of reason and human selfishness. While Del Toro may not manifest any compelling ideas about how to save the world, his anger at humanity’s failures — which leads to expressions of rage in the form of smash-a-thon mayhem — is justified.

I’ll revise my thoughts later, but for now, here are two more reviews that I find insightful and informative:

–

Zacharek:

“The bald truth is that del Toro is one of the few young filmmakers working in the mainstream who actually has any vision, as opposed to just a knack for dreaming up cool effects. Hellboy II – poetic, funny, darkly romantic and beautifully structured – is a very different picture from Pan’s Labyrinth. But there’s no doubt that it springs from the same cathedral.

…

There’s so much to look at in “Hellboy II” — so many weird beings with crepelike skin, or eyes in all the wrong places — that the picture runs the risk of being excessive. But in the end, its grandness works because it’s so well balanced by the expressions on the actors’ faces (even when those faces are laden with latex and makeup), or by offbeat little touches like the troupe of cats who cautiously emerge from beneath Hellboy’s bed after he and Liz have had a particularly noisy dust-up. I confess I’ve come to dread movies in which the hero faces down an “army” of anything: Elaborate battles are now a staple of fantasy movies, and the big CGI showdowns of the “Lord of the Rings” pictures set a standard that everyone is now trying to top. But bigger isn’t necessarily better — in fact, it seldom is. Even del Toro seems to realize that, and he constructs the climactic battle sequence so that it caps off everything in the story that’s come before — the movie ends with an emphatic (if somewhat open-ended) period instead of three exclamation marks.

And as with the first “Hellboy,” del Toro is most interested in using fantasy to explore the humanity of his decidedly nonhuman characters.

…

But Guillermo del Toro’s “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” is something else again: It’s too wildly fanciful, too witty, too operatic in its vision, to fit comfortably into any of the convenient folders we might use to keep our mainstream entertainments sorted in our minds. I left the theater so enraptured, so energized, that it didn’t immediately register that I’d just seen a “special-effects” movie, although, of course, I had.”

Turan:

The parade of creatures Del Toro and his team have come up with as this scenario unfolds, starting with a tour of the legendary Troll Market that one-ups the Mos Eisley cantina scene in “Star Wars,” will make you want to tip your hat in wonder.

There is also a giant beanstalk that resembles something out of “Lord of the Rings” and ends up like a creature Japanese animator Hiyao Miyazaki might have dreamed up. And the film’s Angel of Death, also acted by Doug Jones (who was Pan in “Pan’s Labyrinth”), is everything a creature with that name ought to be.

Though “Hellboy II” is finally a film taken from a comic book, the passion of Del Toro, who was so involved with the story he did the creature vocals, helps us forget that.

More than anything, this film makes us eager for Del Toro’s next announced project, J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” in which the director’s prodigious gifts will be combined with one of the great fantasy franchises of modern times. That should really be something to see.

Greydanus:

First and foremost, Hellboy II is a riot of creature and set design as well as outsize action set pieces. What makes this stuff work especially well is Del Toro’s penchant for props and prosthetics rather than overreliance on computer graphics.

…

At the same time, Del Toro never reduces the characters to mere action figures. Not that character development is high on the movie’s priorities, but the personalities and relationships remain at the fore…

…

In the original Hellboy, the villains were adversaries like demons, Nazis, gods of chaos, assassins and necromancers‚Äîcharacters understood to be evil more or less by nature or by definition, like orcs, vampires or witches. Hellboy II shifts from this kind of mythic good-vs-evil storytelling to something more like classical mythology, with variously flawed characters on all sides.

Except for an occasional cross or rosary, the vestigial Christian influence from Hellboy is virtually gone here. In its place is something a lot like a work of pagan imagination, at times partially reminiscent of the worlds of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, with his ambiguous antagonists and animistic spirit-creatures.

This isn’t simply a bad thing. Good-vs-evil storytelling aptly reflects the black-and-white world of spiritual warfare, but conflicts in the visible world are seldom so clear-cut. Even Nazis aren’t really pure evil like demons, though movies and comic books might treat them as such. Most people who do bad or even horrible things are more like the denizens of the troll market than typical movie monsters‚Äîmore interested in going about their business than making life miserable for other people.

Del Toro has fleshed out the villainy of the villains. What he still hasn’t fleshed out is the heroism of the heroes‚Äîtheir humanity, yes, but not their heroism. Two films into the Hellboy franchise, what is still missing is redemption‚Äîa crucial theme, as Roger Ebert noted this week on his blog.

I believe Hellboy and his allies are tough and fearless enough to fight and win and save the day. I don’t yet know‚Äîand I’m not sure they know‚Äîwhat they fight for, what they believe in, what in their world is worth saving.

Ebert:

He has an endlessly inventive imagination, and understands how legends work, why they entertain us and that they sometimes stand for something. For love, for example.

Plenty more at GreenCine Daily.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Previous Post

July 10, 2008

Reader Mail: "The Shack"; Sixpence's Christmas; "My Kid Could Paint That"; "Sex and the City " Claims Another Victim.

Next Post

July 11, 2008 Browser, 6/11: Radiohead w/lasers!; My Chat with Kim Ketola; "WALL-E"; "Where the Wild Things Are"; Outlandish Outlander; Sixpence None the Richer; E.B. White

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Blog Bloggers on "Through a Screen Darkly" Browser Coming Soon Endorsements Fiction Books Film Forum Film Reviews Inspirations Interviews Journal Kindlings Muse Movie buzz Music Reviews Non-Fiction Books radio Reviewers on "Through a Screen Darkly" The Auralia Thread Through a Screen Darkly Through a Screen Darkly - Bonus Materials Top 10 (or 20 or 100) lists Uncategorized

Select a Month June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 July 2003 May 2003 March 2003 September 1999

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What was a "phylactery," criticized by Jesus in Matthew 23?

Select your answer to see how you score.

A robe A small box with Scripture A lamp A fishing net