Hellboy II: The Golden Army, round 2.

"Guillermo del Toro's 2004 Hellboy, based on the popular Mike Mignola comics about a spawn of Satan who heroically helps humanity fight off beasts and bad guys from all dimensions, was no classic, but it's certainly looking a lot better now that Hellboy II: The Golden Army is hitting theaters," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Despite a handful of creepy and visionary sequences, this sequel remains limp and unengaging."

"No, Hellboy isn't a bittersweet fable like Pan's Labyrinth or a supremely creepy coming-of-age tale like The Devil's Backbone, but even with all its romping, stomping action-adventure (and there's plenty of that), there's a peculiarity to Hellboy that blurs the line between del Toro's Hollywood blockbusters (Blade 2, Mimic) and his less conventional Spanish-language films," writes Jürgen Fauth.

Updated through 7/14.

"Smitten still with the movies of his youth, the 43-year-old del Toro joyfully references everything from the cantina in Star Wars to the Alien pod field to Ghostbusters' marauding dough boy," notes Chuck Wilson in the Voice. "With this new Hellboy, del Toro is clearly coasting, and while there's no shame in having some summertime fun (and making some summertime money), the question hangs: Is del Toro a mad genius or an imaginative hack? Or both?"

"The original worked because Del Toro is a fan-boy who exults in both his hero's crash-and-bash potency and his morbid spiritual dislocation," writes David Edelstein in New York. Here, the "best scene is when Hellboy and Abe get drunk and sing out raucously, which after Hancock suggests a trend toward superhero alcoholism. The economy?" Also, Brent Simon talks with Del Toro.

"[T]here are more eye-popping creatures in the background here than the original had all together," notes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine.

Updates, 7/10: "Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the first pitch-perfect hybrid of the personal and professional del Toro," writes Tim Lucas. "On one hand, it is a wonderful, commercial, highly accessible entertainment; on the other, it is consistently stimulating to the mind and appealing to the eye. It meets all the requirements of summer blockbuster fast food, but it's actually nourishing."

Jeremiah Kipp in Slant: "Though Hellboy II caters to the fanboy crowd that wants to see rock 'em, sock 'em monster fights, Del Toro's strength as a filmmaker is the same as Peter Jackson's in The Lord of the Rings - an ability to create a legion of creatures and their fantasy worlds, then take the time to give these beasties a very specific look that defies CGI whitewashing."

"There aren't many directors who can pay homage to both The Dark Crystal and Ghostbusters and not end up with a complete mess," notes Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle. "But the movie also reaches a point where the plot, emotional impact and even some of the performances are sacrificed to the clutter of the director's vision. After nearly two hours, there's only so much awesome creature design a viewer can take."

For Michael Wilmington, writing at Movie City News, Hellboy II "is one of my so-far favorites of this summer's flood of big, splashy action fantasy movies... And I suspect it will remain that way. (I've already seen The Dark Knight.) In many ways, it's more fun, more magical, more delightfully characterized and more splendiferous imagined and stunningly visualized than the others - perching atop a summer short list that also includes WALL•E and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

"Hellboy II suffers, in my opinion, from too much of everything," writes David Poland. "[A]s the movie pressed on, I was more and more aware of the size of the visual palette and less and less interested in the storytelling, the basics of which were there, but often seemed like the afterthought. In other bad words, Guillermo Goes Lucas."

In the New York Press, Armond White explains why the Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" and Adam Sandler's Little Nicky are better. Meanwhile, for Simon Abrams, this is "a long sprint through a series of loosely connected episodes that feel like the serialized issues of a comic. That having been said, Hellboy II also has a comic's worst attributes."

James Rocchi talks with del Toro for Cinematical.

Connor Kilpatrick talks with Ron Perlman for Vulture.

Updates, 7/11: "In Mr Perlman's performance you catch glimpses of Bogey and Lee Marvin and hints of Robert Mitchum and George Kennedy, all blended with devilish glee and disarmingly sexy sincerity," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And the movie itself is similarly easygoing in its eclecticism."

"When people say that comic books are as close as our secular late-capitalist culture gets to having its own mythology, it's not generally meant as a compliment," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "But over the course of two Hellboy movies..., Guillermo del Toro has started to look like a legitimate successor to Ovid. Del Toro is not so much a creator of myths as a collector of them, a transhistorical myth nerd whose pantheon of influences ranges from Hesiod to Harryhausen (with liberal helpings of steam punk and Catholic iconography). In Hellboy II: The Golden Army, del Toro continues to develop his own private eschatology, a vision of the end of the world dominated by motifs of meshing gear wheels, dangling rosaries, and the looming visage of a devil with sawed-off horns. The joke is that this crimson-faced demon is also a beer-swilling regular guy, not to mention the universe's only hope for salvation."

"The bald truth is that del Toro is one of the few young filmmakers working in the mainstream who actually has any vision, as opposed to just a knack for dreaming up cool effects," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Hellboy II - poetic, funny, darkly romantic and beautifully structured - is a very different picture from Pan's Labyrinth. But there's no doubt that it springs from the same cathedral." That's a reference to Cathedral Head, one of the movie's minor characters.

"As a fan of Mr del Toro's art-house hits who finds most superhero movies tedious and freighted with gratuitous noise - visual as well as aural - I'll confess that the film's big battle sequences made me sleepy," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "Likewise, the sheer extravagance of the director's esoteric monster designs and hallucinatory netherworlds almost feels like a waste, because the pace of the film allows scarce time for the images to resonate or permeate the viewer's consciousness in a meaningful way. If Pan's Labyrinth was a boutique display of Mr del Toro's dreams and nightmares, then Hellboy II is a yard sale that anticipates a Christmas rush on plastic replicas of its boogeymen at Toys 'R' Us."

Del Toro "has the wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "All his films, whether based on US comic books or his own verdant visions, are uniquely and vibrantly Del Toro. From Cronos through Hellboy II, there's a consistency of visual tropes: the insects, crucifixes, subways and bizarre clockwork devices, not to mention his ethereal or infernal or disgusting creatures - the good, the bad and the ugh-y."

"Hellboy II can't help but feel slight following Pan's Labyrinth, but that's part of its charm," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Think of it as a pleasant diversion for del Toro and his fans before the epic task of mounting The Hobbit for producer (and fellow geek-god) Peter Jackson."

Jonathan Pacheco at the House Next Door: "With Hellboy II, del Toro has gotten much closer to creating what I've always craved from him: a fully-realized world."

"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," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Hellboy II: The Golden Army will help you remember."

Del Toro "has an endlessly inventive imagination, and understands how legends work, why they entertain us and that they sometimes stand for something," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"Imagine one of the Star Trek crews transported to Tolkien's Middle Earth, or Buffy and her Scooby gang whisked away into the heart of Narnia," suggests Jette Kernion in Cinematical.

"While Hellboy II still hasn't quite found that perfect mix of horror and subtle comedy present in the comics, it's a vast improvement on the first film," writes Jonah Spangenthal-Lee in the Stranger. "We're clearly in store for another sequel, and if del Toro is again allowed to run wild, the series can only get better."

"Which Hellboy II Creatures Deserve Their Own Spinoffs?" asks Linda Holmes for Vulture.

Updates, 7/12: Latest CulturePulp from Mike Russell: "Hellboy 101."

"With his newest fantasy, Guillermo Del Toro has earned a place at the table with Jim Henson, George Lucas, Peter Jackson and Hayao Miyazaki as one of the big screen's most imaginative inventors of new worlds." Jeffrey Overstreet argues the case.

Noel Vera: "Iron Man can keel over dead, Wall•E rust in a corner, Kung Fu Panda choke on his chopsticks and Hancock sear his black butt on a hot grill; the most satisfying summer movie to date has to be Guillermo del Toro's flat-out beautiful Hellboy 2: The Golden Army."

Updates, 7/14: The latest addition to DK Holm's Directors Project: Guillermo del Toro.

"You may not be overwhelmed by the thinly drawn Shakespearean character dynamics or the predictably action-heavy denouement, but this movie is about the moments in between - the simple, seamless unfolding of narrative energy," writes Ted Pigeon at the House Next Door.

For Bryant Frazer, "Much of what happens here is frustratingly routine, but the high points are worth making time for."

Robert Levin, writing at cinemattraction, this is "a wholly satisfying sequel."

Posted by dwhudson at July 9, 2008 2:23 PM