Movie-A-Day #15: "Hellboy 2: The Golden Army"

"I bought you a pair of shoes
A trumpet you can blow
And a book of rules
On what to say to people
when they pick on you
'Cause if you stay with us you're gonna be pretty kooky too...."
-- David Bowie, "Kooks"

***

I scoffed just a little when I read that Guillermo del Toro, fresh off the success of "Pan's Labyrinth," passed on making "I Am Legend" because he wanted to do "Hellboy 2."

That was largely because I thought del Toro could've dodged the pitfalls that felled the otherwise admirable "Legend" in its third act.

But it was also because I really didn't feel any great affection for the original movie. It was fun. It was noisy. It had a surprisingly amiable title character. But, at least in my memory, it was too clogged up with karate fights and Nazis in fetish gear.

I may have to go back and see the first one again because the sequel is fun and surprisingly heartfelt -- it divides its time between big action set-pieces and scenes that underscore the humanity of this band of freaks that fight off ... well, bands of freaks.

These characters may have tails or gills or diving bells on their heads; they may be able to start fires with their mind or scan memories and intentions with a single touch. But they're human in most other respects and the movie has a lot of fun juggling the characters' contradictions. Whereas Batman stands on rainswept rooftops brooding over it, Hellboy and his makeshift family bicker and drink beer together.

del Toro also gets another chance to trot out his clickety-clackity Rube Goldbergian mechanisms, his jittery insects, his outlandish characters that seem to have stepped straight off the page of a sketch-book. Somehow he manages to return to the same ground make it seem fresher the second time around. He also plants a final-reel seed that -- much to my surprise -- made me anxious to Hellboy 3 bound onscreen sometime in the distant future.