Beautiful to behold but the average plotting and characterisations balance that out to make a solid and entertaining blockbuster

Rating: Null/10 (15 October 2008)

Despite his best efforts, the work of the Bureau for Paranormal Research & Defence is still secret, with Hellboy unable to be more than some blurred photos leaked onto the net and Agent Manning stressed out about the difficulty in controlling his team. Behind the scenes, internal relationships between Hellboy and Liz are strained, with Liz keeping a secret that will change their lives. They quickly have to focus on much bigger problems though as Elf prince Nuada returns from his self-imposed exile to take the throne of his father and awaken the legendary Golden Army to break the long-held truce between his people and humanity. So begins a race against time for both sides, to recover the three pieces of the golden crown needed to awaken and command the indestructible army of 4900 golden machines.
The Hellboy series has yet to really excite me as part 2 left me with the same overwhelming feeling of it being "OK" that the first film had done. In reviewing the first film I had said that if it carries on then I doubt it would get much more than one more film unless it addressed these issues and mostly I felt that the film didn't look to the core of the weakness. This is in how unengaging I found it and it comes from the plotting and the characters. Here we have a solid enough plot that offers another opportunity to force Hellboy down a "you with them or with us?" line as well as "developing" the characters by way of changing relationship dynamics. These things are all done but they are not really "delivered" so much as just put on the screen like you would put books on a shelf. This pure functionality in the writing is pretty much what keeps me from really getting into it and in this regard it is just like the first film, except this time it can't be covered by the "introduction" format and it stands out a bit more than it should So what we are left with is actually quite a "normal" blockbuster in regards plot and characters. We have the world in danger, we have a grumpy hero with an arsenal of guns and one-liners, a good looking woman, sidekicks, nasty villains and so on. As a result we do get a reasonably solid film but it does help that for all the lack of imagination in his script, del Toro has brought his A-game in the design and realisation of the creatures. As a work of visual creativity, the film is wonder of weird creations that are fascinating and inventive. The problem is that perhaps the rest of the film doesn't deserve this level of creativity in this aspect because the rest of it doesn't fit.
The cast mostly find themselves working within the parts that are not as good as the design. Perlman is always a bad-ass presence and as such is welcome in the character, but he can't do much with it other than be "big" and "mean"; what few chances there are to do more are awkward because it doesn't fit with the majority of what he is doing. Blair is a better actress than this film would suggest and again she is handed a "development" subplot that isn't actually developed and as a result she doesn't convince - doesn't always look the most natural in busy FX scenes either. Goss and Walton are not the best villains but they are engaging enough to carry their parts. Jones is the usual good "man in a suit" across several characters and brings physical presence to those characters well. Tambor is left with a comedy role that is not actually that funny, while the addition of the character Krauss is a nice one.
Hellboy 2 is not a great film but it is still a solid and engaging one. To look at clips or still though, you would expect so much more because visually it is wonderfully designed in the creatures and sets that are throughout, but this imagination and creativity is lacking in other aspects such as characters, script and plotting. It never bored me or made me hate it but at the same time it never really excited or engaged me as a total film. Almost worth seeing just for the visual extravagance of it but disappointing for the rest of it being rather ordinary by comparison.