This is collection of reviews that I found interesting and helpful. The collection will be revised as I find more notable assessments online. Feel free to submit more reviews, or even your own, in the comments below.<\/p>\n
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s most imaginative inventors of new worlds. Hellboy II: The Golden Army<\/em> is far superior to Hellboy<\/em> in many ways. In fact, it\u2019s my favorite comic book movie of the year so far.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The villains in the first Hellboy<\/em> film failed to be anything close to interesting, and Del Toro\u2019s wild imagination seemed straitjacketed by studio contraints and genre conventions. By contrast, the villains in Hellboy 2<\/em> are interesting, even sympathetic \u2014 viewers should have no trouble understanding what motivates them.<\/p>\n The first Hellboy<\/em> had a ruinous conclusion, borrowing the showdown from Men in Black<\/em>, which was itself anticlimactic. The confrontation at the end of Hellboy II<\/em>\u00a0may end predictably, but it\u2019s a dazzling spectacle.<\/p>\n Where the monstrous Hellboy and the handsomely gilled Abe Sapien stood out in a crowd as remarkable mutants in the first film, in Hellboy II<\/em>\u00a0we\u2019re surprised when a typical human being shows up.<\/p>\n The bar has been raised for Halloween costume parties: Hellboy II<\/em>\u00a0is one of the greatest exhibitions of hand-crafted creatures ever to reach the screen. It\u2019s too bad Stan Winston didn\u2019t live to see it open, and that Jim Henson isn\u2019t here to see the best display of animatronic genius since The Dark Crystal<\/em> (a film that Hellboy II<\/em>\u00a0references more than once, from a mind-melding elfin female to the Garthim-like Golden Army).<\/p>\n And it\u2019s saying something that the film\u2019s two best scenes are almost asides: I won\u2019t spoil them, but you\u2019ll know the first has arrived when you see Hellboy standing at a wall of lockers, and the second when you hear the voice of Barry Manilow. (Trust me.) These two scenes may be the most uproariously funny in any of the last decade\u2019s comic book hero features.<\/p>\n While Hellboy himself is a joy to watch, he doesn\u2019t steal every scene like he did last time around. This time, the scene stealer is an \u201cectoplasmic mystic\u201d named Professor Johann Kraus, a gaseous entity housed in the costume of a robot straight from an Ed Wood movie. Kraus, voiced by Seth MacFarlane, beats the snot out of another character in an action scene that\u2019s unlike anything you\u2019ve seen before. I love this character, and would happily follow him into his own spin-off.<\/p>\n The only disappointing aspect of Hellboy II<\/em>\u00a0for this viewer was the disappearance of David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe. Doug Jones, who fits so neatly into that amazing costume, provides Abe\u2019s voice this time, and he does a fine job. But Pierce\u2019s highly mannered voice was perfect for the character, and without him, Abe seems diminished. Too bad, because he has a bigger role to play this time around.<\/p>\n Del Toro obviously viewed this as a chance to see just how high he could reach, how far he could go as a choreographer of special effects mayhem. I\u2019m sure the lessons he learned will serve him well when we go down, down, to goblin town in The Hobbit, and when the spiders run rampant and capture Bilbo\u2019s dwarves in Mirkwood Forest. If this was Del Toro\u2019s audition for a chance in Middle Earth, he would have passed with flying colors. With Pan\u2019s Labyrinth<\/em> and The Devil\u2019s Backbone<\/em>, he proved himself capable of powerful, profound storytelling. With Hellboy II<\/em>, he proves that he can carry us away into worlds we never dreamed possible.<\/p>\n In spite of the film\u2019s large cast of freaks and its almost-perpetual violence, we can still sense Del Toro\u2019s gentle heartbeat, his sensitivity, in the characters\u2019 conundrums. Prince Nuada, who claims leadership of an mythic underworld, commits a brutal murder at the beginning of the film in order to inherit power and support. But we quickly come to understand his compulsion. Just as the trees fight back in Shyamalan\u2019s The Happening<\/em>, so nature\u2019s gods and all of the mysterious creatures of myth and spirit are going to unite and fight with Nuada against humanity\u2019s oppression. Yes, this is another in a new surge of films emphasizing how it\u2019s the world, not humankind, that needs to be saved. Neither the humans nor the villains seem interested in redeeming a fallen humanity\u2013they seem stuck in a hopeless decline, fighting to preserve the magical and the beautiful.<\/p>\n In the real world, great works of myth and imagination are some of the most potent forces in fighting back against the tyranny of reason and human selfishness. While Del Toro may not manifest any compelling ideas about how to save the world, his anger at humanity\u2019s failures \u2014 which leads to expressions of rage in the form of smash-a-thon mayhem \u2014 is justified.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll revise my thoughts later, but for now, here are two more reviews that I find insightful and informative:<\/p>\n \u2013<\/span><\/p>\n Zacharek:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe 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. Hellboy II<\/em> \u2013 poetic, funny, darkly romantic and beautifully structured<\/a> \u2013 is a very different picture from Pan\u2019s Labyrinth<\/em>. But there\u2019s no doubt that it springs from the same cathedral.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n There\u2019s so much to look at in \u201cHellboy II\u201d \u2014 so many weird beings with crepelike skin, or eyes in all the wrong places \u2014 that the picture runs the risk of being excessive. But in the end, its grandness works because it\u2019s so well balanced by the expressions on the actors\u2019 faces (even when those faces are laden with latex and makeup), or by offbeat little touches like the troupe of cats who cautiously emerge from beneath Hellboy\u2019s bed after he and Liz have had a particularly noisy dust-up. I confess I\u2019ve come to dread movies in which the hero faces down an \u201carmy\u201d of anything: Elaborate battles are now a staple of fantasy movies, and the big CGI showdowns of the \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d pictures set a standard that everyone is now trying to top. But bigger isn\u2019t necessarily better \u2014 in fact, it seldom is. Even del Toro seems to realize that, and he constructs the climactic battle sequence so that it caps off everything in the story that\u2019s come before \u2014 the movie ends with an emphatic (if somewhat open-ended) period instead of three exclamation marks.<\/p>\n And as with the first \u201cHellboy,\u201d del Toro is most interested in using fantasy to explore the humanity of his decidedly nonhuman characters.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n But Guillermo del Toro\u2019s \u201cHellboy II: The Golden Army\u201d is something else again: It\u2019s too wildly fanciful, too witty, too operatic in its vision, to fit comfortably into any of the convenient folders we might use to keep our mainstream entertainments sorted in our minds. I left the theater so enraptured, so energized, that it didn\u2019t immediately register that I\u2019d just seen a \u201cspecial-effects\u201d movie, although, of course, I had.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Turan:<\/strong><\/p>\n The parade of creatures Del Toro and his team have come up with as this scenario unfolds, starting with a tour of the legendary Troll Market that one-ups the Mos Eisley cantina scene in \u201cStar Wars,\u201d will make you want to tip your hat in wonder.<\/p>\n There is also a giant beanstalk that resembles something out of \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d and ends up like a creature Japanese animator Hiyao Miyazaki might have dreamed up. And the film\u2019s Angel of Death, also acted by Doug Jones (who was Pan in \u201cPan\u2019s Labyrinth\u201d), is everything a creature with that name ought to be.<\/p>\n Though \u201cHellboy II\u201d is finally a film taken from a comic book, the passion of Del Toro, who was so involved with the story he did the creature vocals, helps us forget that.<\/p>\n More than anything, this film makes us eager for Del Toro\u2019s next announced project, J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s \u201cThe Hobbit,\u201d<\/a> in which the director\u2019s prodigious gifts will be combined with one of the great fantasy franchises of modern times. That should really be something to see.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Greydanus:<\/strong><\/p>\n First and foremost, Hellboy II<\/em> is a riot of creature and set design as well as outsize action set pieces. What makes this stuff work especially well is Del Toro\u2019s penchant for props and prosthetics rather than overreliance on computer graphics.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n At the same time, Del Toro never reduces the characters to mere action figures. Not that character development is high on the movie\u2019s priorities, but the personalities and relationships remain at the fore\u2026<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n In the original Hellboy<\/em>, the villains were adversaries like demons, Nazis, gods of chaos, assassins and necromancers\u201a\u00c4\u00eecharacters understood to be evil more or less by nature or by definition, like orcs, vampires or witches. Hellboy II<\/em> shifts from this kind of mythic good-vs-evil storytelling to something more like classical mythology, with variously flawed characters on all sides.<\/a><\/p>\n Except for an occasional cross or rosary, the vestigial Christian influence from Hellboy<\/em> is virtually gone here. In its place is something a lot like a work of pagan imagination, at times partially reminiscent of the worlds of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, with his ambiguous antagonists and animistic spirit-creatures.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t simply a bad thing. Good-vs-evil storytelling aptly reflects the black-and-white world of spiritual warfare, but conflicts in the visible world are seldom so clear-cut. Even Nazis aren\u2019t really pure evil like demons, though movies and comic books might treat them as such. Most people who do bad or even horrible things are more like the denizens of the troll market than typical movie monsters\u201a\u00c4\u00eemore interested in going about their business than making life miserable for other people.<\/p>\n Del Toro has fleshed out the villainy of the villains. What he still hasn\u2019t fleshed out is the heroism<\/em> of the heroes\u201a\u00c4\u00eetheir humanity<\/em>, yes, but not their heroism. Two films into the Hellboy<\/em> franchise, what is still missing is redemption<\/em>\u201a\u00c4\u00eea crucial theme, as Roger Ebert noted this week on his blog.<\/p>\n I believe Hellboy and his allies are tough and fearless enough to fight and win and save the day. I don\u2019t yet know\u201a\u00c4\u00eeand I\u2019m not sure they know\u201a\u00c4\u00eewhat they fight for<\/em>, what they believe in, what in their world is worth saving.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ebert:<\/strong><\/p>\n