Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and some language.
reviewed by Christopher Lyon
What should we do with Hellboy? He's a superhero that looks like the devil, talks like a cigar-chomping 50s tough guy, and has a soft spot for kitties. He's a demon that fights for humans against supernatural evil, but how do you root for a demon, really, if you believe in demons? It's a question he wonders about, too.
The Story
The plot and backstory are impossibly complicated to break down in a few paragraphs here. Skip this if you know it already. If you don't, here's a tiny thumbnail.
Hellboy is the comic book creation of Mike Mignola. He's a blood red demon with horns (truncated), a goatee, and a tail, as well as a "right hand of doom" made out of stone. He was more or less summoned from a version of hell by the Nazis at the end of the World War II to help their cause (but came pre-installed with a destiny to bring about the end of the world). Captured by the Americans, he was raised to be a good guy at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense by an adoptive dad/paranormal scholar.
Backstory #2: In Earth's ancient days, a war between humans and Elves (along with every other supernatural being) was decided when the Elf King allowed the creation of an indestructible "Golden Army" of 4900 robots to kill all humans. Sickened by the carnage, the king made a truce with the humans instead of wiping them out, agreeing to keep all the elves and other boogie people to the forests if the humans would stick to the cities.
Flash forward to the present: The Elf King's son Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) has had enough of human parking lots and strip malls. He sets out to unite the crown that controls the Golden Army so he can awaken the beasts and finish the war against humankind. Standing in his way: his twin sister Nuala (Anna Walton), who hides the final piece of the crown from him in hopes of stopping his war.
Enter our heroes from the BPRD to help her: Hellboy (Ron Perlman); Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a conflicted human torch with a big secret; Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), a mind-reading humanoid blue fish-man with gills; Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), their government supervisor; and Johann Krauss (James Dodd/John Alexander), a ectoplasm whiff of smoke/spirit who mostly occupies a pressurized suit.
Along the way to the final showdown, battles will be fought with all kinds of creatures great and small, animal and vegetable. Love and loyalty will be tested for at least two couples. And every viewer will tour director Guillermo del Toro's Dark Emporium of Grotesqueries, Monsters, and Weirdness.
The Verdict
What we thought of the movie on its own terms.
What Works: Del Toro, who also directed the first "Hellboy" film, along with "Blade II" and "Pan's Labyrinth," displays his horrific and spectacular imagination to full impact. From the tiny man-eating "tooth fairies" (who devour a couple of guys onscreen) to the devastating Mr. Wink monster with his metal "fist on a chain" to an angel of death lady with eyeballs on her feathers surrounding her misshapen "head" -- sitting through this film is like walking through a Bizarre House of Wonders or seeing descriptions from the book of Revelation come to life.
His monster-making gets fully unleashed in the "troll market" scene, in which we see dozens of different monster types of every size, shape, and smell crammed into every shot for a full 10 or 15 minutes sequence.
Somehow, though, Del Toro anchors all the beasties in a world made real enough by his complicated, often funny characters and their familiar bouts of love, self doubt, and courage. Ron Perlman plays Hellboy with so much fun and conviction that the big guy never comes off as silly, which is a major accomplishment for a character who lives inside a glorified Halloween costume.
The action sequences, too, benefit from Del Toro's touch. Yes, they're convincingly "real feeling" even in the midst of all the CGI monsters and stuntacular fight scenes, but they're also precise and mechanical and yet still strewn with his trademark brand of organic, messy beauty.
What Doesn't Work: If you're not a Hellboy fanboy, all the plot and character detail begins to pile up as the film rolls along -- and you begin to get the sense that you're missing things. If you don't understand and buy into the mythology, the story loses steam. And while the comic relief is welcome (especially in the Barry Manilow sing-along), it doesn't always work.
Also, while all of Del Toro's creature creations are impressive, they're almost too much sometimes. Occasionally, I found myself thinking about what that creature must have looked like on paper in the initial sketches. I was admiring the monsters as artwork more than fearing/cheering for them as scary/funny characters. The foreignness and complexity of the beasties actually took me out of the story instead of burying me in it.
Content: "Hellboy" is a visually scary movie full of icky monsters and a high human body count. My call would be to keep little kids far away, but there were several at my 10 p.m. screening (one that left crying). The comic book action violence occasionally becomes real horror violence (but with PG-13 amounts of blood and little gore). Hellboy's tough talk includes saying God's and Jesus' names as curse words.
Worldview
"Hellboy" is built on a richly detailed spiritual worldview that accepts supernatural evil as a reality. Hell (or something like it) is a real place, and real demons exist in bodily form. The first Hellboy movie dealt more specifically with Christianity and religion. Hellboy fought demons and ghosts and other supernatural evil with lots of Catholic icons like holy water, church relics, and a bit of the "true cross." That story implied, at least, the existence of a true God and Jesus, His Son.
That's not to say, of course, that its supernatural worldview is a biblical one. It borrows bits from several spiritual and religious traditions -- including the "rules" of old school vampire movies in which evil can be resisted in the name of (and/or with symbols of) Christ.
In "Hellboy II," he still wears a Catholic rosary on his wrist and carries his specially sanctified gun. Liz still wears a prominent cross necklace. But the spiritual emphasis is on the Old World-view displayed in stories like Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series. Its full of races of elves and goblins and an elemental forest plant "god."
Instead of black-and-white "good" and "evil," Del Toro (also the film's writer) takes us into a grayer world in which good characters makes some questionable choices and you can kind of see where the bad guy is coming from. Hellboy himself is still the biggest question mark. He fights to protect humans; he has made a choice to "end well" by doing good. But we hear again that his ultimate destiny is global destruction.
The demons described in the Bible never wrestle with such issues of identity. Jesus encounters demons repeatedly, casting them out of humans often. Their mission is always singular: human destruction, either physical or spiritual. They lead or cause humans to hurt themselves and others. Peter said that still goes on; people (including believers) are the targets of supernatural evil. Paul urged Christians to take ownership of spiritual armor to make our stand against spiritual enemies.
As a story and a character, Hellboy wrestles with the question of whether any being can overcome the evil that exists within himself. Mostly, Hellboy seems to have done this, fighting only for good. We don't know if he will ultimately succeed. God's Word declares that nobody can overcome the evil within without first trusting in the blood Jesus spilled to pay for human sin. Demons cannot be redeemed in the real spiritual world, but humans must be if we hope to escape spending forever in the real hell where there are no superheroes to save us.
Questions:
- Your take: Should Christians just steer clear of Hellboy, approach with caution, or embrace the franchise as fans?
- Were you surprised by the actions of "good" characters forced to choose between a person they love and the fate of the world? Do you think they did right or wrong?
- If you're a fan of the comics, were you satisfied with Del Toro's second film? How about the first?
- Was it just me or did that giant plant Hellboy fights remind anyone else of the Rumor Weed from the old Larry Boy Veggie Tales video -- especially in the way that battle ends?
- Was it just me, or did the whole Golden Army story line feel like a remix of the Lord of the Rings? A king uses a troll or dwarf to forge an army deep in the hot earth to wipe out his enemies and take control of the world?
- Del Toro claims not to be religious, but to be spiritual. Do you believe in a real supernatural world full of angels, demons, Satan, God, heaven, hell? Why or why not? Does believing such things change anything about the way you live -- or the way you watch movies?