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Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hello and thanks in advanced for reading my review of Hellboy II: The Golden Army starring Ron Perlman, Luke Goss, Seth MacFarlane, Selma Blair, Doug Jones and Anna Walton.

The first Hellboy was pretty good. I enjoyed him 'bounty hunting' all these different creatures that I hadn't seen before and getting around to saving the Apocolypse by destroying some huge tentacled monster. I liked the story and even though I didn't expect it to be much, it surprised me with great acting as well as a good overall film. So when I heard they were doing a sequal I was happy. It was going to be bigger and better. So I went into this film with high expectations. Did it reach those expectations? Not quite. The film can drag on a bit at times and most of the great things I heard about it didn't really live up to their expectations. But it still had some great action to be seen which is worth the ticket.

So the story starts when Hellboy is still a kid. He goes to his bed and gets told a story about a goblin king creates a golden crown for the elven king that will allow him to rule 4900 big, golden soldiers. He uses this power against the human race. Eventually the humans reach an agreemant and forge a truce with the elves. The elves then get two parts of the crown, as the humans get one. So that no one could have that power again. But as usual this truce isn't thought upon to well by the elf prince, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) who trains night and day with his sword so that one day he can claim all three pieces of the crown and once again rule the Golden Army to destroy the human race that forgot about the elves and their land and ruined it for cities and money. So the movie goes on as we watch Hellboy, Abe, Liz and new boy Johann Krauss as they try and stop the Prince by fighting large creatures and going to a mythical underworld.
Now to address the fact about how some of the statements people made about the movie ended up being a little dissapointing. Many people said that all these weird and wonderful creatures you see in this movie is like watching Star Wars Episode IV for the first time and seeing all these new creatures you have never seen. Well I'm happy to say that you do see many creatures you haven't seen before....or have you? This movie was directed by Guillermo del Toro who also did Pan's Labyrinth. Now he does have an imaginative mind but I found most of his creatures to repeat themselves with slight changes. You see the Angel of Death in this movie and she just reminded me a lot of that hand/eye creature in Pan's Labyrinth and most of the other creatures all had the same slits for noses and pale, long faces with wrinkly skin. The Tooth-Fairy however was really cool and Mr. Wink had a cool hand thing. But I just felt like I had seen all those other creatures before and that they were nothing special or amazing like those in Star Wars.

Another thing people said was about this scene where Hellboy and Abe get drunk and then Prince Nuada arrives and Hellboy must fight him off drunk and that the scene is hilarious. Well, that's a bit of an overstatement. Hellboy only seems to be drunk right before he fights Prince Nuada. But once they start fighting he's completely fine and he can fight normally. Give me Jackie Chan fighting drunk in The Lost Kingdom any time.
Then again, I did say this movie had great action scenes, and it does. The two fight scenes against Prince Nuada (then again any fight scene with Prince Nuada involved) was awesome. Not to mention the one with Krauss vs. Hellboy and Krauss, Abe and Liz vs. The Golden Army. These scenes were amazingly done and were very fun to watch and definately worth the ticket price.

The acting was carried on from the first one. No problems with it and the movie had great humour as well and Ron Perlman is still THE Hellboy. My only problem with him was that I think they overused the 'Oh crap' thing a bit too much. But I doubt that's his fault, probably the script writers.

So if you really enjoyed Hellboy you will most likely love Hellboy II. Even though the creatures didn't live up to my expectations and there weren't any memorably characters from the movie which I expected from a Guillermo del Toro film, it was still a good movie that was fun to watch.

I give Hellboy II: The Golden Army: 79%