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It’s more of what you love and some of what you don’t.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a sequel in every sense of the word.  It’s bigger, louder, flashier and forgoes storytelling for bigger set pieces.  The first Hellboy did an excellent job setting up the characters and the world that Hellboy inhabits.  The Golden Army spreads its wings and expands the Hellboy universe in great degrees.  The joy and sense of wonder from the first film is lost in order to create bigger spectacle. 

Ron Perlman returns as Hellboy, the adolescent demon destined to destroy the world.  He’s still fighting with his girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair) and hanging out with his best bud the amphibious Abe Sapien (Doug Jones).  Their latest case has the trio fighting the royal prince of the Fairies, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) as he tries to raise a gigantic robotic Golden Army to destroy humanity.  Along the way, they visit a goblin market, visit the angel of death and battle a huge plant god. 

While the grandeur is there, The Golden Army lacks the fun of the first film.  Writer/director Guillermo del Toro is an incredible visionary who always brings something new and interesting to the screen.  Hellboy II does not fail on that level.  The goblin market, the giant plant god and final battle are amazing to watch.  Guillermo is coming off the success of Pan’s Labyrinth and lots of his creative flourishes can be seen here.  Given a bigger budget to explore his creatures, he doesn’t miss a chance to fill he screen with something new and different often to the detriment of the story.

When the characters are given time to play off each other, movie works really well.  The moments between Hellboy and Abe or Hellboy and Johann Krauss work incredibly well.  It’s when the main plot works in that things start to fall apart.  The story of the prince trying to rule the world starts interesting but nothing ever really happens with it and you know in the end that everything will work out for the best. 

Gullermo del Toro provides an interesting audio commentary for the film and Guillermo has lots to say about the film.  He jams as much information as he possibly can into the commentary.  Fans of the director will not be disappointed.  The cast jump in on a second commentary track.  Jeffrey Tambor, Selma Blair and Luke Goss chatter mindlessly for the two hour runtime.  As excellent as the del Toro commentary is, the actor’s commentary is bad.  Skip this.

The rest of the features are short featurettes focusing on the production design of various elements of the film like the goblin market.  The must watch extras are the “Zinco Epilogue”, a digital comic book that fleshes out the story a bit better; “Hellboy: In Service of the Demon”, a 154 minute documentary about the film, and “Pre-production Vault”, which goes into the director’s notebook and has commentary from del Toro.  There is also a third disc that contains digital copies of the film.

I enjoyed The Golden Army, just not as much as I did the first film.  I wish that Hellboy had done well enough in the theatres to merit a third film but the box office wasn’t strong enough to instantly green light a third film.  Unless the DVD does incredibly well, the odds that we’ll see a third Hellboy movie are pretty slim.  I found this to be a must own personally, but most people will do fine with a rental.

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