Highly imaginative, but highly dull.

Rating: 6/10 (22 November 2015)

Hellboy 2 is an exercise in sheer visual imagination at the expense of depth, emotion and pacing. I mean, in what other film would the main character, a crimson devil who files down his horns to look more human, blow up the head of a nature god with a massive revolver and watch as the nature god's green blood turns everything into a natural paradise? I would hazard to say very few. That's really where the film succeeds. Each monster and set piece in this film is crafted with meticulous innovation and creativity, Del Toro putting a generous dose of creator's love into his work. However, his narrative, while also imaginative, relies too much on clichés and his characters are listless and tiresome. If Del Toro put the same love and innovation he put into crafting the visuals into shaping his characters and his narrative, Hellboy 2 would have been a fine film indeed. But as it stands, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is limp and forgettable, buoyed by little more than few surprising twists and a stunning visual arsenal.
Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a reluctant government agent who arrived from another world. He loves cats, television, and his wife, Liz (Selma Blair), but is discontent with his sheltered and secretive existence in the basement of some government facility in the middle of nowhere. He wants, as the saying goes, "to fit in". But of course, considering the fact that he happens to be a crimson devil, complete with horns and tail, that isn't going to happen. I did like Perlman's performance. Hellboy is a beer-drinking, gun-toting badass with a surprising outlook on life. He's an irresistible character, if a tad shallow and impulsive. But the other characters are significantly less so. Both love interests in the film are extremely boring, Del Toro seeing it fit to give them the most clichéd and hackneyed lines in the book. The villain is ridiculous, and the other characters simply aren't there enough.
The narrative is innovative, but lacks depth and even entertainment value, relying on strange action scenes (most of which lack fluidity) while barely ever giving us a break. I suppose that that could be taken as a pro, but I'm going to put it down as a con, simply because the running time is too short to have all that action without sufficient emotion or character development. I mean, if they could squeeze the character development and emotion into the action, I would have been happy.
Hellboy 2 is basically this: Years ago, humans massacred elves, and now, one of them is deciding to bite back by reawakening the "Golden Army", which is literally a massive army of golden cyborgs hidden underground.
Sadly, much of the film is forgettable, excluding some neat set pieces and a few solid action moments. But even the action scenes lack fluidity and movement, opting instead for a slow, blow-for-blow which lasts usually about five to ten minutes, making them rather plodding and unspectacular. Some of them are simply senseless, and some of them focus on Hellboy way too much.
What I wanted from this film was del Toro to put the same love he did into making his characters into shaping his characters. There is tension, yes, but the tension is often laughably clichéd. The characters develop in tiresome, by-the-book ways. It becomes difficult to care for anybody excluding Hellboy.
Creativity alone is enough to designate this film as a good film, as creativity is so often lacking in modern blockbusters. However, this film falls short past the realm of visual creativity, creating a story that is poorly paced and executed, characters that are for the most part tiresome, and action scenes that lack motion. All in all, Hellboy is a fine visual piece, but rather a dull film.