The first Hellboy was loads of fun, a movie about a comic book superhero as different from the tight wearing paradigms of virtue on the theater screens next door as you could get. Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, not yet a household name (though he was up and coming — he turned down a chance to helm Harry Potter in favor of Hellboy), brought relentless imagination, quirky fun, irreverent camp and unremitting action to his tale of a hell-spawned demon who fights baddies on behest of the U.S. government.

This new installment, which reunites the cast and crew, raises the bar exponentially. Everything — the imagination, action, impertinence and humor — returns in spades. Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a rip-snortin’ blast of a good time. Nevertheless, rather than running into the typical situation in which a film’s story is unable to keep up with its masterful, yet ultimately hollow, visuals, Hellboy II represents a seldom seen quandary: a film that is more broadly imaginative and deeply fantastical than the source material deserves. Is there such a thing as making too good a movie?

Don’t misunderstand me, Hellboy II isn’t going to win any Oscars or find its way onto anyone’s “Best Of” lists. Yet its expansive imagination so elevates the material that you find yourself wishing it was put to the service of something greater. No one questioned del Toro’s choice of projects before he presented us with the gloomily exquisite Pan’s Labyrinth, but now that the true scope and otherworldly breadth of his epic vision has been revealed, it feels like the director is slumming it with his Hellboy sequel, no matter how good a film it is.

Hellboy (Ron Perlman, who stays in cash thanks almost exclusively to del Toro’s frequent casting) and his fantastical cohorts — the pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair, who, if she ever took an acting lesson, doesn’t show it here), the aquatic empath Abe (the invisible yet omnipresent Doug Jones) and the protoplasmic, non-corporeal Johann (Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane!) — all work for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Development. Think Men in Black ferreting out weird, supernatural creatures instead of extraterrestrials.

After the Elvin prince Nuada (Luke Goss) breaks an ancient truce between humankind and the invisible realm of fantastic creatures, seeking to reawaken an unstoppable army of indestructible warriors, the fate of the planet lies in the balance. Only the TV-watching, candy-crunching, kitten-loving Hellboy stands in his way. But when Hellboy’s existence is revealed to the world, will he choose the life he knows among humanity or will he answer the siren’s call of a mysterious destiny that beckons him to join his own kind?

Nuada is one of the year’s great villains, not because he is evil incarnate — far from it — but because he is misguided in pursuit of a worthy and wholly sympathetic objective: staving off the extinction of his race. A flashback in the beginning of the film informs us that humanity and the planet’s magical creatures once lived in harmony until the aggressor humans decided to wage war and conquer the globe for themselves, a bloody crusade they very nearly accomplished. Over time, an uneasy truce was formed, but as a result, the magical creatures began to fade away and die off. Nuada is but a terrible agent of that beautiful, once-proud race, refusing to go quietly into the good night. When Nuada claims that the world will be a poorer place if he and his kind die out, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt he’s right.

At times, Hellboy II rivals Star Wars for the sheer amount of fantastical creatures on display at any one time. A scene at a Troll market will draw inescapable comparisons to A New Hope’s Mos Eisley cantina sequence. While there are too many creatures to keep up with, don’t make the mistake of assuming del Toro has simply populated his new film with leftovers from Pan’s Labyrinth. The Angel of Death is truly terrifying, while the bizarre Chamberlain and Cathedral Head are mesmerizing, like something out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army can be viewed as little more than an overlong sequence of noisy action set pieces with lame, forced jokes and recycled moralizing from the X-Men franchise, connected by the gorgeous ligaments of ingenious creatures and fairy-tale aesthetics. Or, those obscuring, bombastic elements can be brushed aside in order to more fully reveal an underlying story with elements as rich and lavish as anything found in the universe of Tolkien or Lewis. Del Toro’s imagination is both blistering and humbling. Which is probably a good thing seeing as how his next project is The Lord of the Rings prequel, The Hobbit. If del Toro brings to that project even a smidgen of the incandescent imagination seen in his past few films, the result will be an unquestionable masterpiece.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.