Max O’Connell:
Hellboy
II: The Golden Army, a sequel
only a select few were clamoring for, but those who were clamoring
for it were correct.
Loren
Greenblatt: Oh, it is
delightful. The film came out in 2008 and was a little overshadowed
by Iron Man
and The Dark Knight,
along with Indiana Jones and
the Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. Now
a lot of us, myself included, were immensely disappointed by Indy
IV, but for me Hellboy
II erased my disappointment
completely. The film is in much the same vein and gave me the pulp
adventure fix I didn't get from Spielberg. I know some people will
find this controversial, but I'm gonna say it: As much as I truly adore The Dark Knight, I prefer this film.
MO:…I’m
not going to get into this argument again (NOTE: we did, and we had
to edit that out of the conversation’s transcript). Let’s talk
about Hellboy II.
MO:
Yeah, that’s the best part of that particular film, but it’s not
as good.
LG:
And I love that Hellboy’s thing of mispronouncing words started as
a kid: he pronounces “indestructible” as “industable”. Then
we get these wonderful gear-credits before we meet the most
sympathetic villain in all of Del Toro’s films.
MO:
Prince Nuada, played by Luke
Gross (Nomak from Blade II),
is unhappy that the humans forgot about the elves and destroyed most
of the forests, has decided to repair the crown, reclaim the Golden
Army, and fight back. He’s not a bad man- he’s fighting for his
dying culture- but he’s doing bad things. Humanity has not exactly
respected his people.
LG:
Humanities ability to reject
anyone it sees as different is a huge theme here. Hellboy is still
not happy being an outsider who has to hide, and he’s going to make
his presence known. I love that he has to deal with the real world
now. It’s man vs. nature again, but nature is fighting back. It's a
very different film tonally, It’s lighter and zippier, but no less
complicated and sincere.
MO:
Since John Hurt died in the first film, Jeffrey Tambor is the new
boss, and he still has a wonderfully contentious relationship with
Hellboy.
LG:
It’s played a little more
for laughs here. Hurt was Hellboy's real father figure and now comes
Tambor as a kind of step-dad whom Hellboy just has no respect for.
The harder he tries to get Hellboy in line, the more he regresses
emotionally. The first film dealt with how these monsters dealt with
being outcasts, this one deals with how they fair in the spotlight
when Hellboy decides to reveal himself to the public. This was
probably inevitable. Hellboy's greatest aspiration has always been to
be just an ordinary guy.
LG:
And this puts a lot of tension
on her relationship with Hellboy. It’s a bit cartoonish and
exaggerated, but it’s fun and it fits the tone of the film very
well. Liz needs Hellboy to grow up, and there’s more urgency to it
because she learns early on that she’s pregnant.
MO:
There’s also more push against Hellboy. As he fights for humanity,
they don’t accept him. He saves a baby, and the mother screams at
him and asks him what he’s done to the baby. He gets stuff thrown
at him and people call him a freak.
LG:
He’s a very conflicted guy. He’s a demon from Hell, sent
ostensibly to bring the apocalypse, but because of his upbringing, he
was brought up to love people. But there’s always that sheet of
glass between them, and it really bothers him. His need to be loved
becomes so obsessive that it’s self-destructive.
MO:
Liz points out that they’re
just not going to accept him, so she and Abe will have to be enough.
There’s a sense that they’re more comfortable with each other at
this point. In some of the arguments between Hellboy and Liz, she’s
on fire (she’s pyrokinetic), and that’s just something that’s
kind of accepted.
LG:
Yeah, she’s more casual about her powers now. She’s learned how
to control it, but when she gets angry, it still comes out. It’s a
bit like if the Hulk went through anger management.
MO:
There’s also a great scene with Abe and Tambor walking through the
halls while casual monster stuff happens in the background of the
Bureau, and they’re not paying attention to it at all. Abe’s
explanation for something weird when Tambor does glance back at it:
“Oh, it’s Friday.”
LG:
That sequence does have a bit
of a Men in Black/Ghostbusters
feel.
MO:
That’s astute, because like
Men in Black,
these are just people doing their jobs, and sometimes not doing it
very well. Plus, Danny Elfman does the music this time, and there are
tones similar to his stuff in Men
in Black.
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MO:
Which Abe is mortified by.
There’s the troll that has a baby thing on his side that keeps
making fun of him (it’s like a humorous Total
Recall homage). And when
Hellboy apologizes for scaring the baby, it says, “I’m not a
baby, I’m a tumor”.
LG:
There’s a creature who runs a map store, and his head is shaped
like a cathedral. This thing is bursting at the seams with
imagination.
MO:
A lot of this is Del Toro
getting the chance to run wild with delightful showmanship in
monsters. It actually reminded me a bit of Evil
Dead II. Nuada’s troll
guardian Wink has a mechanical hand that crawls by itself at certain
points. And the fight between Hellboy and Wink has moments of great
slapstick humor that shows Raimi influences. Hellboy has a cigar that
gets smashed: “That was Cuban! Now you pissed me off!”
LG:
It’s kind of like a riff on the sunglasses action movie thing,
where the bad guy breaks the hero’s sunglasses, and then we know
shit just got real. It’s very funny.
MO:
One of the big changes amidst all the weirdness- we got rid of that
useless audience-surrogate character. I understand that the actor was
unavailable because he was doing something on Broadway, but I can’t
imagine Del Toro minded. Mr. Studio Note, as we remember him, didn’t
really add much.
LG:
There would have been no place
for him in this narrative. Now, the Tooth Fairies in general are very
much like a Raimi or Looney
Toons thing, where the tooth
fairies are constantly crawling up people’s legs and, when they’re
smashed, they splatter on the camera in a really fun and inventively
gooey way.
MO:
Del Toro has said that his favorite movie of all time, though, is
Bride of Frankenstein, and
you can tell considering how much he sympathizes with these monsters.
He actually plays a clip of it on one of Hellboy’s TVs after he
gets rejected, where Karloff’s monster yells “We belong dead!”.
These people don’t have a place to belong, except with each other.
That feeling was present in the first film, but it’s amplified
here.
LG:
I’m really glad they changed
up the tone. If it had the same gothic feel as the first, it’d feel
repetitive. Del Toro’s at a different point in his life. The first
film is more about finding yourself and trying to get into a
relationship, and this one is more about maturity. It allows the
characters to progress, unlike what happens in most superhero
narratives where people are just sort of frozen in time.
MO:
And there are moments of inventiveness that I really love that play
into the story. Nuada has a twin sister name Nuala, and there’s a
bit of a yin-yang thing. She’s very sweet, but she and Nuada have a
thing where if one of them is injured, they both feel it. Nuala has a
connection with Abe because they have telepathic powers, and Abe
falls in love with her almost instantly.
LG:
That would be annoying in another movie, but it’s justified here
because of the way Abe works. He’s such a sweet, inexperienced and
innocent guy that I’d believe him falling in love that quickly.
LG:
Me too.
MO:
…but this moment of them drunkenly singing out of tune to “Can’t
Smile Without You” filled my heart with joy.
LG:
It’s one of the most
wonderful surprises in a film full of wonderful surprises. It’s
borderline surrealistic to see this blue fish-man and a giant devil
get drunk and sing Barry Manilow. It’s adorable.
MO:
We also get another new
character, Johann Krauss (voiced by Seth McFarlane), who’s
interesting because he’s ectoplasmic energy within a mechanical
suit (with mandibles, no less, because Del Toro loves bugs). And he’s
German. Hellboy doesn’t like Germans. He makes a couple of cracks
about Nazis that are in poor taste, but Hellboy can be kind of a dick
sometimes, so it’s just the character’s actions that are in poor
taste, not the film itself. He does not like Krauss’ sense of
order.
LG:
He’s another in Del Toro's line of clockwork men.
MO:
But there's more to him. After
(Spoilers)
Hellboy is critically injured, Liz rebukes him for not being human
anymore, but Krauss finds his inner humanity, and they’re able to
save him. (End
Spoilers) But to the same
extent, there’s some part of Krauss that is right in his criticisms
of Hellboy, because His macho thing is pretty over-the-top. When
they’re in the roll market and Hellboy beats up on everyone, a lot
of it is unjustified.
MO:
And as it’s killed, blood starts turning into moss, and it spouts
flowers all over the place. There’s something beautiful about it,
but it’s also very sad. This is also Del Toro’s best action yet.
LG:
This is a guy who took to action very well, but he’s very good at
not repeating himself. It was kung-fu in Blade
II, it was wrestling Hellboy,
and here it’s a very fluid mix. Hellboy is slower, Nuada is faster.
And it’s very inventive. Hellboy flips around in chairs like Jackie
Chan, he kills monsters while holding a baby like Chow Yun-Fat, and
there’s also light comedy that recalls Chaplin and Keaton. It’s
very fluid- Del Toro uses pans and dollies to keep everything in the
frame, and he doesn’t cut a lot. The choreography is wonderful,
too.
MO:
The film has my two favorite
fights in any of Del Toro’s films. One is with the Golden Army,
which is this great Harryhausen-esque thing because even though it’s
CGI, there’s something of a stop motion quality about their
animations.
LG:
I do like the design. They’re like eggs that open up into these
robots with fire inside them. And I love that even though they’re
mechanical they seem to feel pain, and they scream like train
whistles.
MO:
Hellboy and Krauss fighting
against them is a lot of fun because they have to take them apart
one-by-one, Hellboy with brawn, Krauss by possessing one of them. And
then we learn that they can reconstruct, which leads to the next
fight. In order to stop them, Hellboy has to challenge Nuada to a
fight. It’s heavy-handed guy vs. a quick guy, and they’re
fighting over a gigantic gear set. Del Toro uses it well to have
Hellboy fall in the gears (Cough–Modern
Times–cough) and hide and
come back up on another one.
LG:
There’s great levels to play with, and it’s very dynamic and
fluid.
MO:
Going back to thematic stuff- Abe’s justification for protecting
Nuala is that she’s alone in the world, and he has to help her.
She’s like him. And the fact that Liz and Hellboy are willing to go
to the ends of the earth for each other is central. It may lead to
something really terrible. In this film, it leads to the only truly
great set-up for a sequel I’ve seen in any comic book movie ever,
and it comes naturally in the story and not after the credits, so all
the rest of you superhero movies can eat it.
(Spoilers
from here on out)
LG:
The first time Hellboy and
Nuada fight, Hellboy is stabbed with a spear that breaks off in his
chest, and we learn that it’s a magical fragment that slowly inches
towards his heart, and any attempt to remove it brings it even
closer. This gives a chance for a nice reversal, because in the first
film, Liz turned into a damsel in distress by the end. Here, she has
to be the hero, and she’s very internal, so it’s a great way to
push her character to take charge. They go to Ireland to find Nuada,
they go underground, and they meet the Angel of Death.
MO:
Played very well by Doug Jones, in another first-rate performance.
LG:
It's another great creature. Its eyes are in its wings. And the Angel
of Death says that she’ll save him, but Liz needs to know that
he’ll bring about the apocalypse, and that Liz will suffer more
than anyone else because of it. But she doesn't care about the
consequences, because she loves him. It sets up the sequel
wonderfully. He is a demon sent from hell, and the idea that sets up
where the hero will be either the villain or have to make the
ultimate sacrifice. It’s an extremely bold choice, it’s unique
problem for Hellboy, and bravo to Guillermo for finding a way to set
this up that doesn't stop the momentum of the film or feel tacked on.
In fact the knowledge that Hellboy will one day go through all this,
I think, changes the way we look at the ending, particularly the last
scene where they all quit.
MO:
It’s not an in-joke, it’s
not fan service. This is absolutely natural for who Hellboy is and
how this has to end.
LG:
But we’re not sure if it’s going to. These movies don’t cost a
lot, blockbuster-wise, but they also don’t make an outrageous
amount. I think Hellboy II
could have made more, but it did come out in a very bad time.
MO:
Two weeks after WALL-E,
and a week before The Dark
Knight. Unfortunately, it was
only going to do so well. We are hopeful that Del Toro will get a
chance to finish his, though he’s gotta hurry up, because Ron
Perlman is 63.
LG:
Luckily with Hellboy it’s easier to do things with stuntmen because
of all the makeup, but he’s getting up there.
MO:
Not that we’re afraid that he’s going to drop dead, but he is the
only person who can play this part. Who else could deliver those
lines? A great Bride of
Frankenstein reference as
Jeffrey Tambor promises him a cigar if he stays out of the spotlight:
“Cuban good. Being seen bad.”
LG:
And there’s something else of note at the end as Nuada dies, asking
Hellboy if it’s going to be “them (humans) or us”, and Hellboy
can’t answer him. I don’t think he has an answer.
MO:
And this happens because Nuala, for the good of the world, kills
herself. It’s a beautiful moment of self-sacrifice, and it’s a
throwback to the emotional ending that didn’t quite work in Blade
II.
LG:
And I like that this gives
more emphasis to fantasy than the religious themes of the first one.
It gives it a different flavor. I have no idea what they’ll do for
Hellboy III, but
I can’t imagine they’d repeat the same thing again.
MO:
It’s a pure, fun film, and it’s one of my favorite superhero
movies.
Loren's Grade: A
Max's Grade: A-
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim
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