I can’t for the life of me understand why Hellboy II: The Golden Army has got such glowing reviews. Nothing too unusual about the likes of Empire and Ain’t It Cool offering unstinting praise to a comic-based film (4 stars from Empire for Sin City? I mean, come on…Sin City?), no matter how average, but I was a bit surprised to read glowing reviews from The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw and from Time Out, normally bang to rights with every review.Seemed to me Guillermo del Toro fell straight into the Tim Burton trap of caring far more about the production design than the camerawork, pacing, editing etc. If you care too much about what’s on screen and too little about the tools you use to put it up there then you’ve basically got the cinematic equivalent of prog rock.
The saving grace was some of the interaction between characters – Hellboy and Abe, pissed and singing along to Barry Manilow was a nice touch – but too often this just seemed like the usual semi-ironic approach you get to superhero films. It seemed like any other director could have directed that film and not much would have been different – as though del Toro spent so much time designing the things in the scene that he forgot to design the scene itself, if you see what I mean. One of the things that’s so beguiling about the comic is the sense of design in every frame – sparse, gloomy and impeccably laid out. In this, every scene was chock full of bloody goblins, making it a bit like how the inside of Games Workshop must appear to twelve year-old boys. And there was too much CGI.
And too many goblins.
And Harry Knowles loves it, and he’s a fat tit.
