Hellboy II: The Golden Army Review

It's difficult to know what to expect from "Hellboy II: The Golden Army". On the one hand, there's the first movie - director Guillermo del Toro's attempt to condense Mike Mignola's first five Hellboy graphic novels into two hours, complete with decidedly rubbery monsters and the addition of a surplus to requirements love triangle - which received a mixed reaction from fans and critics alike. On the other, big, stone hand, del Toro's last film, "Pan's Labyrinth", is one of the best movies in recent memory. The prospect of a Hellboy film in the style of "Pan's Labyrinth" is a very exciting one. However, right from the start "The Golden Army" confounds expectations.

The movie opens in a style different to anything del Toro has done before. Without going into spoiler-type detail as to how it does it, the prologue tells the story of an ancient battle between faerie and man, which ends in a truce only when the elf king Balor realises that his battle-deciding, indestructible army of golden mechanical warriors is too terrible to be unleashed upon the world.

Act one returns to a more normal style - if 'normal' is a word that can be used to describe a del Toro film - with Balor's son Nuada (Luke Goss) coming out of millennia-long exile and vowing to use The Golden Army to wage war on mankind. Sounds like it should be just another day at the office for the World's Greatest Paranormal Investigator, but Hellboy is starting to have doubts. Should he try to defeat Nuada if it means he has to destroy magical creatures like himself along the way?

One of the ways "The Golden Army" confounds expectations and differs from "Pan's Labyrinth" is the movie's sense of humour. The sequel is much more of an ensemble piece than the first film, with each of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.) characters getting an expanded role, which means more dialogue and more jokes. However, the part that gets the biggest expansion is that of Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and at times "The Golden Army" feels like a Hellboy / Abe buddy movie. The scene where the pair give a drunken rendition of Barry Manilow's song Can't Smile Without You is very funny indeed. Fans of the spin-off B.P.R.D comics will also be pleased with the inclusion of Johan Krauss (voiced hilariously by "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane), a disembodied German ectoplasmic being with a containment suit and a fish bowl for a head.

Neither are there more references to the comics than in the first film as might reasonably be expected. Goss does get some of Rasputin's lines from the graphic novels in trying to tempt Hellboy to join the forces of darkness, but primarily he reprises the physical role he played for del Toro in "Blade II" and is just as impressive in the fight scenes. However, with the use of popular music, the light comedy and the dark colour palette, the overall tone makes "The Golden Army" feel much more faithful to the comics than "Hellboy".

But the original plot is really just an excuse for del Toro's to let his imagination run wild and come up with a spectacular array of monsters, each one incredibly detailed even though they may only appear on screen for a few seconds. Mr Wink, The Angel of Death, Cathedral Head - he's got a cathedral for a head! - there are just too many to name. This too is in the spirit of Mignola and given del Toro's preference for physical effects over CGI, this sense of giddy creativity grounded in the technical constraints of the real world is reminiscent of nothing so much as early George Lucas.