Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Uugh. I haven't been looking forward to this review, I've been putting it off and putting it off in the hope that I might get Alzheimer's or something. Sadly I'm more or less still all here so lets put on our wellies and go wading in shit.

Hellboy 2, a movie with a relatively cool bad guy and not a lot else going for it. I should have known that something was wrong when David Hyde Pierce didn't return to provide the voice of Abe Sapien (don't bother watching the movie for it, he's uncredited), I know that he can't have made that much money working on Frasier that he no longer needs the work, so I can only assume that he has standards.

The biggest threat to Hellboy in this film is an Elemental (that's a God of one of the cardinal elements for those of you who don't follow fantasy or play that financial black hole World of Warcraft), in this case it is an Elemental of Nature. A Tree God who has the rather glaring weakness of having a giant hole in his head like the Nihilinth, and much like that Half Life über-beastie firing a weapon into this hole tends to cause extreme anger followed by death.

So the general gist of the movie is that Hellboy is running around all full of angst about being hidden from humans whilst this halfway cool bad guy is trying to raise an army of paranormal beings to crush mankind. The usual fare, but this time done by elves instead of Nazi's, Mummies or Jet-Li.

You can imagine exactly where this is going and there really is no point in me trying to repeat this tripe to you, it's an old story that has been done many times before and almost never done well. Of course his angst eventually gets the better of him and he manages to get himself exposed in dramatic fashion to all of the world, and typically the humans don't particularly like him.

What I will say is that it is a very sumptuous looking film, Guillermo del Toro has a unique visual style that lends itself very well to the pseudo-paranormal realm of the Hellboy universe.

I don't like ragging on Hellboy because I like Ron Perlman, he is a good actor and most of his parts are generally unique and recognizable characters, but this movie frankly is beneath his ability.

From start to finish Hellboy 2: The Golden Army feels like it is just filling time until Hellboy 3: The Cash-in, it's a pointless movie. Completely and utterly pointless.

Rating: E

(Note how I managed to avoid mentioning Northern Ireland?)