Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Guest Review - Richard Carpenter

If you like fantasy, disgusting monsters, over the top action, and the most clichÈ one liners like, "oh crap, here comes another monster that is only slightly uglier than the last one," than you will love Hellboy II: The Golden Army. But on the other hand, if you are like me, and you like interesting storylines, characters you can connect with and care about, and great action scenes that don't make you pull out your cell phone and calculate how many text messages you received per hour that day, you may not like this movie. I'm just sayin'.

The movie begins in 1955 with a young, bucktoothed Hellboy watching TV and living a seemingly normal kid life with his "father." Hellboy listens to his father tell him a bedtime story about an ancient myth involving goblins, trolls, and Elves in a great war against mankind. The elves build a giant automaton Golden Army (that totally look like Bionicles) to finally defeat men. Only then does the Elven king regret his actions and vows to never again awaken the hoards of golden warriors.

We then jump to the present day and a very different kind of Hellboy (I think it might be appropriate to change his name to Helladult or something here). The true monster of Hellboy's adult life is his live-in girlfriend, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and her fiery reactions to his stereotypical "man" behavior. So between fighting all manner of disgusting creatures, Hellboy tries to figure out just how a guy is supposed to deal with living with a woman who becomes the human torch whenever he doesn't do the dishes.

But in the underworld, all hell breaks loose when the bad guy, Prince Nuada decides to thwart his Elf King father and begin a dastardly quest to re-awaken the Golden army and wage war against the greedy and oblivious humans. Hellboy is thus caught in a cosmic battle between good and evil. Consequently, he is caught between his desire to be accepted in the human world and the reality of his beastly appearance and undeniable connection to the world of monsters and elves-two worlds that can't seem to peacefully co-exist. But when it's said and done, our Hellish hero's inner conflict is not very well explored by the film. Just when I thought it was about to get interesting, another monster would break into the scene and smash it all up.

Guiermo Del Torro throws us into the action pretty early on with all kinds of totally disgusting creatures, but then slows things way down, almost to halt and spends, what I think all you Hellboy fans out there will agree, is a bit too much of a love story. Everybody is falling in love and I'm almost wishing for a slimy creature to burst out of the floor and spare us from some sappy romance.

I give Hellboy II: The Golden Army 2 out of 5 golden Bionicles.
However, I decided pretty early on that this movie was just not made for me. But, I can confidently say that if you liked the first Hellboy installment, you're probably going to like this one.

The PG-13 rating is right on: kids and parents, watch out from some pretty frightening fantasy violence and a bit of harsh language. I don't think you want your 5 year old talking like our red hot-tempered hero.