Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Directed by Guillermo del Toro (R)

Destined for evil, a devil opts to be good and help humankind.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

***

More than most superhero films, Hellboy II: The Golden Army seems to be a “comic book come alive,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Picking up where 2004’s Hellboy left off, Guillermo del Toro’s film finds its do-gooder demon hero caught between two worlds: While trying to fight evil and save humankind, he again becomes drawn to his dark side. By now, audiences have seen one comic-book character after another hit the big screen. But del Toro is “almost alone” in recapturing the “wide-eyed exhilaration and disturbing grotesqueness that is the legacy of reading comics on the page.” The film is a visionary parade of strange creatures and oddball ideas, said Richard Corliss in Time. Along with Pan’s Labyrinth, it proves that del Toro has the “wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies.” The director lets his freak flag fly here, and that makes the film both “strange and endearing.” But he’s let it run a little too wild, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “With a big budget to play with and a pop-culture franchise to tend,” del Toro ultimately overloads the film with too many characters, moods, and genres, mistaking compulsive invention with true creativity.