7.14.2008

Hellboy II: The Golden Army


I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that this movie about...uhhh.....well, it's about...uhmm... I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that this movie was pretty stupid.
That isn't to say I wasn't entertained, because I was entertained most of the time. But in my first (documented) disagreement with my best friend A.O. Scott of NYTimes, I found the film very tedious and slow at points, whereas he felt the film "pack[ed] a remarkable range of moods and genre elements into a fairly compact 110 minutes." It definitely felt like one-hundred and ten minutes.

I saw Hellboy II because of Pan's Labyrinth; also, I wanted hard evidence as to what vision director Guillermo del Toro may bring to his version of The Hobbit. I hated the first Hellboy, and thought Blade II was as dumb and pointless as 'dark' action movies could get (not that "dark," full of stupid poses w/ sunglasses, full of...well, shit). At first, I didn't enjoy Pan's Labyrinth either, because I didn't know it was a Spanish Civil war movie with sci-fi/fantasy overtones - rather, the other way around. But the visual style of Pan captivated me, and when I saw the Hellboy II trailers (click on title of blog to view or here), I revelled again in del Toro's visual technique and artistic conception of otherworldly creatures. Ecstatic to see a world filled with nothing but these creatures, I plopped $10.50 on the counter for something I didn't get. Don't assume that a film with such visual cohesion could be, in any other conceivable way, cohesive.

What a mess. And that's fine - why do we see action movies anyway? The key to a successful hodge-podgin mess is that I don't sit back mid-movie and think that. Then I don't care what creatures you've created - my watch suddenly looks way more interesting.

Plus side? I laughed very genuinely multiple times. Del Toro has a knack for infusing humor into his bizarre stories - very much a relief for the forthcoming Hobbit film(s). Put this guy to work, Peter Jackson.

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