Movie Talks Archives

Posted by: JCPhoenix at July 29, 2008, 7:53 pm

Topic: Hellboy II: The Golden Army Forum: JoBlo

SPOILERS Decent but not as good as I expected based on the reviews. What's good about the film? The visuals. All the crazy creatures in the film were just incredible, interesting designs. There are so many subtleties in the way they move and react to what's going on that they really feel like they live in the world. They were the major reason I enjoyed the film. The action sequences are pretty good. I really dug Ron Perlman overall in the film and things felt more unique and alive than the last film for sure. BUT...there's a ton of bad that I feel was overlooked because people just dug the visuals. And most of the bad is all in the script. I felt Pan's Labyrinth was a little symptomatic of this approach where it felt like things were made up as they went along (in Pan's Labyrinth, which I did enjoy quite a bit, each task felt just not too integrated into the film. By that I mean, the task could have been fetch a piece of crap from the toilet and things would have still turned out he same). In this film, while I dug the idea of this living breathing world around them that is not entirely explained, I didn't like how convenient things felt. They get to the Golden Army area and there's just conveniently some creature there who can bring them to the Angel of Death to heal Hellboy. Just like of all the places, of course the Princess just conveniently happens to be at the Troll Market. Those were just minor problems for me though. My main issues were some plotholes I feel haven't been addressed. The biggest and most obvious one to me is...why didn't they burn the golden army crown before? The princess had part of it at the headquarters and then they just argue a bit over who should be keeping hold of the artifact. If Selma Blair's character can burn it later on, she should have just been able to burn up part of it there and then and there wouldn't be a problem. Secondly...I don't buy Abe's actions for a second. He meets this princess like a day before and suddenly he's in love with her. Okay fine, I can deal with that. What I can't buy is that he would give up this piece of the crown to the prince, knowing it would probably doom the world and the prince would probably kill them anyway. Okay, you might say, he's in love with the princess. I get that he MIGHT do it if he was saving the princess. But he absolutely isn't. The princess is linked to the prince, therefore, the prince will never hurt her. Therefore, he basically fucked over humanity just for a possible remote chance of seeing the princess again. Not even saving her. That is just 100% unbelievable to me. And let's not mention all the times when the characters just STAND AROUND as evil things are happening in front of them (the prince puts on the crown slowly, no one goes forth to try and stop him first? the prince takes out that glowing egg thing very very slowly, reaches up so everyone can see it, then throws it and everyone just STANDS THERE...on top of that, as the creature grows, Hellboy and them just stand there with their backs to the prince the entire time...). And of course there's the time when the princess tells Abe that she and her twin brother are linked and that he knows their location...you'd think they would do a little more on the security end if they find that out but what do they do...oh yeah, go get fucking hammered. That makes a lot of sense. Or the fact that most of the script is essentially just an excuse to keep bringing out new weird creatures that don't affect the actual storyline much at all. Most of the creatures are cool but not integrated in the least in the storyline. Just like I felt in Pan's Labyrinth. The forest god, for that matter, was completely, utterly anticlimactic. Here you have this big, massive creature that the prince unleashed for I-have-no-idea-what-reason and then...all it takes are a few big bullets to kill it. Okay then. Why did the prince unleash this in the first place? Yeah the prince happens upon Hellboy in the middle and yabbers on a bit about having a choice but quite honestly...throwing some egg, hoping it will conveniently fall into a sewer where there's water, just to grow some big monstrosity that can be killed by a few gunshots seems like a really roundabout and, um, complicated way to prove those points to Hellboy. And the people turning on Hellboy there? I didn't buy it in the vein of the scene when it's fairly clear there was a massive monstrosity wandering around crushing things and Hellboy just very clearly saved their ass and gives the kid back perfectly. Yeah there was a bit of hostility before to Hellboy here and there but there was also some semi-goodwill when he first revealed himself fully to the people. And finally, Selma Blair...I liked half of the lines she delivered in the film and the other half I thought she was uneven. Her entire performance as a whole though, I felt like she was doped up on Valium or something. I don't know if it was the actual script or her performance, but something struck somewhat off (even her flames, like said above, looked inferior to me to the blue flames from the last film). The relationships just felt barely convincing to me and sometimes there was too much over-the-top stuff, and not enough actual meat to make us care about the relationship between her and Hellboy. The comedy was half and half (some of it worked really well - most of the Johan Krauss stuff was funny - while the lines that fell through just felt...really really lame). I thought the music by itself sounded decent but in the context of the film it was so over-the-top epic and sad and just a tad inappropriate at times that it made the movie feel cheesier. But even with all those criticisms, I still enjoyed the film to an extent. That enjoyment was 90% based on the stunning visuals and the fact that the movie still moved at a relatively good pace with all its flaws. I'd give the movie near perfect marks on visuals. On a story/dialogue level, this would warrant about a 3 or 4. 6/10...maybe, MAYBE a low 7/10 but I gotta think on it

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