THE TROUBLE with the current spate of comic-book movies is that their numbing conventionality can make it easy to forget why you loved the original comics back in the day. "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" will help you remember.
With movies such as "The Incredible Hulk" and "Iron Man" falling off the Hollywood assembly line like so many identical toaster ovens, it's refreshing to see what happens when a visionary filmmaker such as Guillermo del Toro falls in love with a superhero who was described in the first "Hellboy" film as "6-foot-5, bright red, has a tail and is government funded."
Starting with characters created by Mike Mignola for Dark Horse Comics, writer-director Del Toro, whose one-of-a-kind "Pan's Labyrinth" won a trio of Oscars in 2007, is almost alone in his ability to re-create on screen the wide-eyed exhilaration and disturbing grotesqueness that is the legacy of reading comics on the page.
Ten effects house combined forces and used both computers and practical effects to animate the widest possible range of strange creatures, allowing "Hellboy II" to come alive with fantasy and invention. To see this film, beautifully shot by Guillermo Navarro, is to truly feel you've entered another world, filled with nightmarish things both unimaginable and indescribable.
Like the comic book it proudly is, "Hellboy II" reintroduces us to the trio of superheroes from the first film, individuals who, like the "Men in Black" of a few years back, are humanity's only defense against unspeakable evil perpetrated by disturbing creatures who walk among us hidden or in disguise.
First among equals at the Bureau of Paranormal Research & Defense (B.P.R.D. for short) is hot-tempered Hellboy (Ron Perlman), a reluctant hero always angry because the public never believes he's one of the good guys. Hellboy's on-and-off girlfriend is Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), capable of bursting into flames if she's not treated right. The role of sidekick is filled by the all-knowing aquatic Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), who has the kind of ageless wisdom apparently only being half-fish and half-mammal can provide.
After a brief moment recapping Hellboy's origins (he was brought to Earth by Nazi occultists and then liberated by the Allied Forces), the film offers a prologue set in 1955. The young Hellboy is living with his surrogate father, Professor Trevor "Broom" Bruttenholm (a cameo by John Hurt, one of the stars of the first film), a scientist who tells the young superhero a bedtime story that conveniently provides the back story for the sequel.
