![]() Today’s magically beastly challenge: the after-effects of a long-broken deal between humans and magical beings to remain separate. Ron Perlman is back as Hellboy who, now more comfortable with his devil-born origins and in a much more stable relationship with Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), still knows no respite from the daily dialectic of helping out humans (who know very little of him and seem to think him a menace) and maintaining his own identity. And because it’s much more indebted to del Toro’s left-field weirdness, when it does become … indulgent … it comes off less confused and more deliriously kitschy and fascinatingly rough-around-the-edges. Curiously, it is both more tightly-packed with imagination and arcane energy and far more streamlined, efficient, and straight-forward, giving it a nimble fire lost to the script contrivances and mundane dialogue of its predecessor. It still maintains some of the trappings of being a Hollywood film, but the resplendent imagination and quirkiness one associates with Guillermo del Toro, who has directed the likes of The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, has seeped through the seams to create a much more fully-rounded, direct slice of everyday fantasy. The sequel, in comparison, is much more assured in virtually every way. ![]() It was on the knife-edge between conventional, everyday blockbuster and visually splendorous off-kilter del Toro fantasy, and the mix was as often messy as it was effective. ![]() Del Toro’s heart was in the right place, but the pressure, or production push-back, for his first big del Toro blockbuster kept things too close to the mundane side of the fence, and too invested in the film’s relatively tepid, over-explained screenplay (exposition being the mark of a movie struggling to make good on its imaginative ideas without the courage of its convictions). Virtually every character other than Hellboy himself was underdeveloped, and the film always seemed to stop short of the imaginative heights it was hopeful to achieve. Ron Perlman was superb as the no-nonsense titular character, and the film was funny in a low-key, sprightly way, but whenever it made an attempt to tell a story – which was too often – it was muddled and inconclusive. The first Hellboy was a bit of a missed opportunity. The visual splendor on display in Hellboy 2, however, exists on another level – its images do not merely heal the eye, but they achieve genuinely transcendent emotional heft all their own. Many blockbusters attempt to find a center in their visuals, some of which succeed and many of which crash under their own superficiality. It’s weighty yet zippy, filled with consequence yet light on its feet, it’s buttoned-up in all manner of cozy, boisterous lights and sounds, and it has a dreamer’s streak a mile wide. This is to say, if a Guillermo del Toro film is all about the Guillermo del Toro visuals he can imagine for us and transfer to the screen, which is not necessarily the case but has some value for his highly and pointedly surface-level films, then Hellboy 2 is a hell of a film. If, as I am increasingly inclined to believe, every Guillermo del Toro film is a “Guillermo del Toro idea delivery device”, Hellboy 2 is right up there with his best works.
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