"Hellboy II: The Golden Army"

July 11, 2008 | There's a minor character in Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" who wears a king's robes and a crown that resembles the spires and turrets of a European fairy-tale city. Except it's not a crown -- this skyline of towers and curving walls springs directly from his head. Explaining the character's conception in an online New York Times feature, del Toro said this regal creature -- who came to be known as "Cathedral Head" -- was "somebody that instead of thinking about his home city, he kind of carried it around."

Del Toro himself is a kind of Cathedral Head, a filmmaker whose strong sense of place -- whose sense of preserving the notion of a personal, if not literal, home -- has been the foundation of pictures like the extraordinary post-Spanish Civil War fairy tale "Pan's Labyrinth" and its precursor "The Devil's Backbone," as well as the two "Hellboy" movies. That the 2004 "Hellboy" and, now, "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" are both mainstream pictures based on comic books (created by writer-artist Mike Mignola), and not "small" pictures initially designated for the art house, doesn't diminish the scope of del Toro's vision. The 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" -- poetic, funny, darkly romantic and beautifully structured -- is a very different picture from "Pan's Labyrinth." But there's no doubt that it springs from the same cathedral.

Hellboy, for the uninitiated, is a strapping demon with red skin and a right hand and forearm that resembles a block of concrete. (As an infant, during World War II, he was rescued from a remote Scottish isle and raised by his adoptive father, professor Trevor "Broom" Bruttenholm, played here, as in the first movie, by John Hurt.) Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a swaggering, wiseacre presence in a duster raincoat: He works for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (which happens to be in New Jersey), and, along with a band of fellow misfits, fights evil wherever it rears its ugly head. Hellboy is a misunderstood beastie, and average citizens don't know what to make of him: His looks scare people, and his inability to tolerate idiots makes him cantankerous. But even though he comes off as something of a roughneck, a cigar-smoking, beer-guzzling, TV-watching guy who's always spoiling for a fight, he's at heart a tremendous softie, as evidenced by the throngs of affectionate kittens who swarm around his feet when he's relaxing at home, in Bureau headquarters. Hellboy's closest friends, the only "people" who really understand him, are his colleagues at the Bureau, including his girlfriend, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a mite half his size who has the ability to start fires spontaneously with her fingertips, and the elegant, well-read aquatic creature Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), who has the gills of a fish and the soul of John Donne.

Del Toro -- who wrote the story and script, working from Mignola's material -- opens "Hellboy II" with a back story in the form of a mythological bedtime tale that Trevor, in a flashback sequence, reads to the young Hellboy (Montse Ribé) about a king (played by veteran English character actor Roy Dotrice) who, in the fight for dominance between the elf world and the human one, assembles a "golden army" of superwarriors. But these troops cause nothing but more heartache and destruction. The king repents, declaring a truce between the two worlds and disbanding the army by literally breaking up his crown and scattering the segments. His power-hungry son, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), a malcontent in an Edgar Winter hairdo, slinks away from the scene in disgust, only to reemerge in the modern day with a plan to reassemble the army and thus take control of the human world.

You can imagine what Hellboy thinks of that plan once he gets wind of it. The biggest complication is that Nuada has a twin, Princess Nuala (played by Anna Walton, in a performance that's both serene and vampish). It's not clear at first where Nuala's sympathies lie. But she is connected to her twin by supernatural bonds: When he bleeds, she bleeds too.

Next page: Creepy-crawly "tooth fairies"!