Hellboy II: The Golden Army, round 1.

"In terms of sheer spectacle and visual invention, [Hellboy II: The Golden Army] is an absolute knockout, frames stuffed with bizarre creatures and mystic runes and arcane weaponry and wondrous design," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "And yet, Hellboy II has more than a little heart to it; it's scrappy and self-aware, and never out of touch with what it is. Adapting Mike Mignola's post-superhero retro-styled comic series Hellboy for the second time, writer-director Guillermo del Toro corrects some of the mistakes of the first Hellboy, makes a few mistakes of its own, picks itself up, keeps going. And, on the way, knocks the back of your eyeballs for a loop."

Updated through 7/6.

"Curmudgeonly, cantankerous, cigar-chomping Hellboy is a cross between a 40s noir detective and a burning fireplace, but he's also cool enough to make Hellboy II: The Golden Army the hipster's hit of the summer," writes John Anderson for Variety. "Yes, Catholic imagery has always run rampant through helmer Guillermo del Toro's movies, including Pan's Labyrinth, which he made in between the two "Hellboy" entries, but he's really an evangelist of fanboy excess: Given the right push by Universal, he'll be making fantasy-horror acolytes out of the heretofore unconverted."

"De Toro stays true to the B-movie tenets of his original, reuniting the sub-A-list cast of Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones and Jeffrey Tambor and maintaining a broad sense of humor," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen Daily. "There is no bombast or self-importance here a la Batman or The Incredible Hulk, just a great storyteller delivering a good time at the movies."

And Michael Rechtshaffen in the Hollywood Reporter: "With writer-director del Toro given free license to go where his singular vision takes him, Hellboy II plays like Guillermo's Greatest Hits with even hotter visual effects - Liz's engulfing flames have come a long way in four years - and a winking nod to The Wizard of Oz tossed into the crazy mix for good measure."

Updates: Anne Thompson listened to Del Toro as Hellboy II closed the Los Angeles Film Festival: It "comes from an exotic country inside my brain and my gonads. People think I do two types of movies: strange little Spanish films and big studio movies. This movie comes from a different place. It's the first of those big movies that belongs to the same world as Pan's Labyrinth. The imagination in it is unbridled."

What follows is precisely the same passage from Moriarty's AICN entry on both Hellboy II and The Dark Knight that Jason Morehead's snipped, but seems worth snipping again:

Bottom line: these are films that are built to last. When someone says to me, "It's just a comic book movie," these are the films that make that statement pointless. Nothing has to be "just" a comic book movie or "just" a video game movie or "just" a remake or "just" a sequel. Every single time you set out to make a film, you have a chance to say something, a chance to genuinely affect your viewer. You don't have to aim for "good enough." Ambition is important, but Hancock proves that's not enough. It's ambition plus inspiration plus creative chemistry plus a little bit of dumb fucking luck that all come together to make movies like these. But the only reason they accomplish anything is because Christopher Nolan and Guillermo Del Toro and all the remarkable madmen they collaborated with in bringing them to the screen... they all dared to drop the word "just" from their vocabulary. They aimed for art. They aimed for pure enduring cinema.

And, good god, we are richer for it.

Updates, 7/3: "Del Toro's baroquely bizarre imaginativeness has never been more mesmerizing than in Hellboy II, its cornucopia of extraordinary creatures (some beautifully melding flesh with metal) seemingly stolen from children's nightmares, and its preponderance of metal gears intrinsically linked to the saga's fascination with fate and free will." Nick Schager.

Update, 7/5: Dave Itzkoff introduces a series of images taken from Del Toro's sketchbook, accompanied by the director's comments.

Updates, 7/6: Michael Guillén has a good long talk with Doug Jones.

Choire Sicha talks with Selma Blair for the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at June 30, 2008 6:16 AM