OVP: Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Film: Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
Stars: Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Seth MacFarlane, Luke Goss, Anna Walton, Jeffrey Tambor
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Makeup)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Sequels to comic book movies are always a tricky affair.  The way that comic movies usually work is that the first film is an origin story, something that tells us the backstory of how some random person (or in this case, spawn of Hell) and how he went from troubled to hero, sacrificing in order to save the world, and what drives his need to save humanity (usually it's an intense love for either a beautiful woman or an altruistic fire that burns within him, which is illustrated by helping a random child or mother while in the middle of a fight that the villain totally allows him time to do).  The second film, however, is always a test of the strength of the writers and the main cast, where we learn whether or not our hero is actually compelling or whether we were just swept away by that tried-and-true narrative.

(Spoilers Ahead) As you may recall, I wasn't wild about the first Hellboy a couple of months ago when I reviewed it, but as I am still fighting my way through the 2008 OVP (we have just three films left to review, two left for me to see), I needed to catch this random Best Makeup contender, the rare sequel to make it where the original wasn't able to connect.  The film picks up a few months after the original, with Hellboy crossing the line from Bigfoot into Superman, something the public discusses but the government doesn't know how to handle. As a result, we see a disgruntled Jeffrey Tambor bringing in a seemingly indestructible force of wind named Johann (MacFarlane) to try and sort out Hellboy.  Being that his name is in the title, Johann ends up succumbing to Hellboy and not the other way around, and this is just one of several moments in the film that feel kind of eye-rolly.

Where the second film loses me compared to the first is that the original occasionally tried for narrower, more interesting takes on certain characters.  The film loses a lot of the interesting characterization that Perlman brought to the lead.  His Hellboy is still gruff, still inappropriately funny, but now is treated more as a fish-out-of-water, someone who is only content having conversations with Liz (Blair) and not really caring too much about the world around him as he seems so sharp in some aspects and so confusingly dumb in others (like his relationship woes).  As a result, he becomes too cartoonish, which was already a risk considering his exterior.  The film maintains the mood of the last movie (the gear-shifting finale being particularly eye-popping, which basically saved this movie from a 1-star rating), which was the first film's other great attribute, but a more toothless Hellboy made this a lesser film.

There were other points in the film that just veered into awful, particularly the relationship between Abe (Jones) and Nuala (Walton), a romantic connection that seemed completely out-of-place and wholly contrived for Abe's ridiculous betrayal of all mankind to save a woman who can't die without the villain dying (which she knows and could just as easily tell him).  Abe was the worst character in the original, frequently struggling to find a balance in his personality (characters exist before movies if we don't see a birth-he should have some sense of identity here), and gets just awful here.  The relationship between Nuala and her villainous brother is complicated and weirdly sexual, which kept this film from totally going "Go get em, tiger," but the Abe/Nuala relationship was inauthentic and almost painful to watch.

The film was cited for Best Makeup, and since we're so close to the finish line for 2008, and since Makeup's the first category I go to in the writeups, I'll keep my thoughts on that to myself for a moment or two (SUSPENSE!), but you can surely share it in the comments, or any other thoughts that you had on the film.  Post away!