Guillermo, what the Hell happened?

Rating: 4/10 (16 July 2009)

If you had never seen the comic, 2004's Hellboy was a fast-moving and funny introduction to the tough-talking, cigar-smoking title character and his fictional world—a world in which a multitude of supernatural forces, some of them malign and jealous of humanity's world domination, are constantly watched, monitored and occasionally battled by Hellboy's sponsor, the US government's "Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense."
Hellboy II: The Golden Army has virtually all the same talent on board, yet comes off as a hollow and unfunny parody of the first film. For every original touch — the rise and fall of the huge plant monster that the elf prince summons to kill Hellboy — there is a blatant rip off such as the Troll Market, obviously inspired by Harry Potter's Diagon Alley, and the walk through BPRD headquarters, so full of suited agents subduing unruly creatures that you expect Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones to show up dressed in black. For every spectacular visual effect — director/screenwriter Guillermo del Toro's wonderful fairies and monsters such as the villain's hulking sidekick Wink (the Fantastic Four filmmakers should check out these makeup artists if they ever want a better-looking Thing)— there is a scene of appalling low comedy, such as Hellboy being beat up by (protoplasmically-possessed) locker doors, or his love-song duet with the elf-queen-smitten Abe Sapien. It is as moments like these, like last year's other franchise-ending turkey, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, that one becomes acutely aware of watching guys in suits. The actors are as good as ever, but the dialogue is rotten, the motivation is thin and Jeffrey Tambor, as the BPRD's fussy and bureaucratic director, is completely wasted.
Del Toro can be a brilliant writer/director. Like Tim Burton — whose filmed oeuvre is also wildly uneven — he understands how important fairy tales, monsters and myths are to maintaining a healthy imaginative life. Like Burton, he also has an extravagant visual sense; del Toro's monsters are as beautiful as they are scary. But even brilliant filmmakers have their failures — for every Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro has made a Blade II, but whatever his faults have been in the past, tedium has not been one of them. I walked out of Hellboy II twenty minutes before the ending, something I usually only do with Peter Jackson films, so perhaps it is not good news that del Toro will be writing and directing The Hobbit. The present film sets the viewer up for a Hellboy III, in which, if the series is not going to descend into self-parody that mixes bad jokes with epic length, we can only hope that del Toro will return to the top of his form.