Hellboy II: The Golden Army

This movie doesn’t have any idea what it wants to be.  It tries to pull a Spiderman and ends up pulling all punches.  There isn’t much here to see, except what might possibly happen if Jerry Bruckheimer ever gets his greedy paws on Ghostbusters 3 (planned for 2010, by the way).  The movie plays like a George Lucas catastrophe, without a thread to hold it together or a shred of a hope of being interesting.  It falls pretty hard on its face early on, and I lost almost all interest.

There are a few good points amidst the rubble.  Jeffrey Tambor is a fine actor, and he saves every scene he can, but even he isn’t enough to save this from becoming just another bad superhero movie.  It’s bad in the way the first Hulk was bad: even the graphics don’t hold your interest.  They aren’t bad graphics…for 1994.  But this 2008 movie should have known better than to try and pull out a sequel from this relatively obscure superhero.  The public likes Bruce and Clark and Peter, because they know them.  They grew up with them, and these characters are part of their psyche.  Hellboy, for all he may be worth, isn’t.  This is really only one of the endless reasons this movie doesn’t work, though.  On a positive note, the makeup is great.  But I don’t remember ever loving a movie because “the makeup is great.”  This one’s no different.

The plot is contrived, predictable in a bad way right down to the last drop, including the role of the infamous Golden Army, and the script plays like a bad undergrad student project.  They clearly had quite a large budget for this movie, but nothing to show for it.  I didn’t really care about the characters, most of which are bad imitations of Star Wars characters, and the suspense which is supposedly built up throughout the movie is unaffectingly affecting, like stale popcorn.

I don’t think 2008 would have been much the worse if this hadn’t been made.  I think Tambor did this movie to make a few extra bucks, and in this economy no one can blame him.  But I hold someone like Guillermo del Toro to a little bit of a higher standard, coming off of his previous work such as Pan’s Labyrinth, one of the best foreign films that I’ve seen.  If nothing else, his effort level is transparent: Pan is great, Hellboy is everything but.  It’s not a good movie, and I don’t recommend it.  Stay away.  Especially if you like del Toro.  (And maybe even if you like Hellboy.)

Rating: 1.5/4 Stars