Hellboy 2

For those of you who've been reading for a while I did a post many months ago about my desire to see Hellboy 2 in the theaters. I wrote a post here about Guillermo del Toro. I love his work. I'm always blown away by his imagery, and captured by the stories he tells. So when my blockbuster movies came due Jeff turned them into the store and picked up both Hellboy 2 and Wall-E for me. Both of which I have wanted to see for a long time.

Hellboy was hilarious. It was campy and fun and riotous. It was beautiful and action packed and filled with just enough one liners to not feel cheesy. Ron Perlman was downright funny and the interactions between him and the agent John Myers was engaging. Hellboy 2 was still visually beautiful but...well...something was missing. Not just the character of Myers who brought that wide-eyed amazement, combined with naive banter. What seemed to be missing was the humor.

Hellboy 2 tackles issues of relationship stress, blood feuds, and fatherhood, all of which are too heavy a subject for this type of film. Even simple scenes like a battle between Hellboy and an elemental turns into a serious environmental message. The scenes with Hellboy and Liz are well done and there appears to be a connection between the two. Doug Jones as Abe is his standard amazing self. But the new administrator (an ectoplasmic steam punk creation with a German accent) is simply bizarre and not in a good way. He lacks any real chemistry with any of the characters and seems inconsistent. Jeff and I kept expecting him to turn out to be a bad guy.

The visuals for this film are amazing, like any good Guillermo film. They are a fantastic mix of light and dark and color and depth. I am so in love with his images. But once it comes to dialogue this movie falls flat. The first one was incredible because of the humor. The one liners, and incredibly campy scenes. The only scene that I found hilarious in this whole film was a locker room scene between Hellboy and the administrator. Other than that the movie tried to hard to make me think. Which is fine with a drama, but not fine with a character named Hellboy.