Skip the first movie if you haven't seen it.  You can always come back to it later.

'Hellboy II:  The Golden Army', like is predecessor, is directed by Guillermo Del Toro of 'Pan's Labyrinth' fame.  Be keeping your eyes on this guy, kids.  He's been hired to direct both of the upcoming 'Hobbit' movies (Peter Jackson will produce).

And if you're really masochistic, you might just check out 'Pan's Labyrinth'.  I saw it in theater, loved it, but flat-out refuse to subject myself to it ever again.

Hellboy is a fairly 'new' character, created by Mike Mignola for Dark Horse Comics, and played by Ron Perlman in both movies.  He is, literally, a devil.  He smokes cigars, chows down six meals a day, loves Baby Ruth bars, has a soft spot for cats, and doesn't get along well with authority.  He keeps his horns filed down to mere stumps because his heritage embarrasses him.

Among his companions are Abe 'fish stick' Sapien, a blue aquatic creature who looks like C-3PO and possesses certain psychic abilities.  Then there's his live-in girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), who… well, see the movie.  I will say that she's totally hot.  And how 'Hellboy II' handles the re-introduction of her character, is the main reason I want you to start here if you didn't see the first movie.

They work for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, one of the FBI's secret pet projects.  As professor Trevor Broom (John Hurt) described them in the first film, "There are things that go bump in the night.  And we are the ones who bump back".

Their new leader is Johan Krauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), an ectoplasmic cloud-like creature, with a German accent, contained in a transparent 'Dark Helmet'-type suit (seriously, you could squeeze Rick Moranis in there no problem).

Discarding your traditional comic book villains (we had Nazi occultists in the first movie), this sequel chooses instead to venture into the realm of folklore, with various mythical creatures (elves, goblins, trolls) waging war against mankind.  Hellboy fights for the humans, but not without coming to question his allegiance.

The ancient warfare between elf and human is told to us (and a much 'younger' version of Hellboy) as a bedtime story complete with popsicle-stick figures.  Eventually a truce was called:  humans could keep the cities, and the mystical creatures got the forests.  Which worked out pretty well, until the humans started building "parking lots and shopping malls."  I swear I'm not making this up.

Fast-forward to the present, when Prince Nuada (Luke Gross, with an ugly horizontal line across his nose) plots to awaken a dreadful army of "seventy times seventy" indestructible clockwork soldiers, with which to vanquish humanity.  His twin sister Nuala (Anna Walton, with that same line dividing her face and far too much makeup) opposes.  Like the Evil Twin Brothers of G.I. Joe (never seen it), each of the elf siblings suffers the other's injuries.

The plight of the elves in this movie, for some reason, makes me think of bin Laden and his goons.  Obviously the humans have no recollection whatsoever that these creatures exist, at all.  There's nothing like being at war -and not even knowing it- because an unknown people have just sort of arbitrarily decided one day that they hate you.  Someone was once quoted saying about al-Qaeda, "They hate us because we don't even know why they hate us."  It is also said that the one thing haters truly 'hate' is being ignored.  From a purely egotistical standpoint, I hope it's true.

Nuada unleashes a wide assortment of creatures into the human world for various means, in addition to the Golden Army itself.  First and foremost are the trolls, who seem vile enough in their own right (one of them is a digusting old lady who swallows kittens whole, much to HB's disapproval).  Then there are the tooth fairies… I kid you not.  These feed off the teeth and bones of helpless people, and then (presumably) defecate all over their gooey remains.  You don't want them in your house.

Most mysterious of all though, is the gigantic octopus-like Elemental… a forest god with shrubs and grass for hair.  A truly magnificent creature, the Elemental seems almost like something borrowed from one of Hayao Miyazaki's animated pictures.  Perhaps it's a distant cousin to the deer-faced Nightwalker from 'Princess Mononoke'.  The monster bleeds green moss when wounded, and even Hellboy -of all people- seems reluctant to kill it.  Nuada of course pleads for its life as being "the last of its kind"… leaving me to wonder why he was stupid enough to summon the thing to battle in the first place.

Hellboy's internal conflict is that he knows the humans will never fully accept him, no matter what.  For a comic book hero, this is hardly an original theme.  I also seriously doubt that a mob of people would take to throwing rocks at the guy (and just because he's a devil and all) after he's gone through such trouble to save somebody's baby from that Elemental.  That Prince Nuada might actually have some degree of righteousness on his side (given the environmental themes that seem to be in play here), is something the movie thankfully never stops to concern itself with.

For Abe 'fish-stick' Sapien, who believes he has finally found his soul mate in the psychic elf princess Nuala, 'Hellboy II' represents a love story of sorts.  HB meanwhile is having his own relationship problems with Liz… being that he never picks up after himself and there's too many cats in their living space.  In probably the most outrageous moment this movie has to offer, we get this completely unexpected, drunken duet with Hellboy and Fish Stick singing to Barry Manilow ('I Can't Smile Without You').

Can you really get away with this in a comic book movie?  Nevermind.  Because now here's a scary thought:  somewhere in the world at that very moment, every superhero we have ever met (Batman, Superman, Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine, etc) is probably singing that very song.  We can add 'Unbreakable' Bruce Willis to the chorus while we're at it.  And perhaps even Farscape's six-armed Pilot.  Anyone who's ever been lonely and a freak.

When HB and Fish Stick are not singing, they are sharing Deep Meaningful Thoughts such as:  why women say they're angry at one thing when it's really something else... or why they get even more angry that you had to ask why they were angry in the first place (For HB accurately senses that it's not just the cats that are bothering his girlfriend.  It's never 'just' the cats, or 'just' anything).

This would seem very 'deep' and all, if director Guillermo Del Toro felt inclined to share the real answer with us guys in the audience… but obviously he himself doesn't know.  In typical movie fashion, HB and Liz seem to get over their problems without ever dealing with them.  Although to be fair, you couldn't seriously expect Hellboy to get rid of the cats.

If I have one complaint about 'Hellboy II', it is that I didn't like the younger boy who played him in the beginning.  He's not bad, I just found him annoying.  What's worse, I kept seeing the young boy's expressions on 'older' Hellboy's face throughout the movie –which I found to be rather bothersome, as Hellboy now seemed to me like an overgrown kid.  "Well that means the kid worked, right?  He was obviously able to channel Ron Perlman's performance."  Or, maybe it was actually the other way around.  Just to offer another way of looking at it.

Overall, I'd say if 2004's 'Hellboy' was just a notch below the first 'Spider-Man', than this was one above it.  It's no 'Iron Man', but I still enjoyed it way better than last month's 'Hulk'.  'Batman Begins' and 'Spider-Man 2' remain untouchable… at least for now.  I'm dragging my dad to see 'The Dark Knight' when he gets in later today.

Later,
Sam