The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Redman & the Clockwork Perils

Here's one I meant to post last weekend. Time and energy simply slipped away, especially with the ever-insidious help of the work week.

Tomorrow we'll be catching an early showing of The Dark Knight, so let's look at last week's entry from the comics to film category.

As of this past weekend the latest of the summer's comics-driven films was Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a sequel to 2004's Hellboy.

Writer/Director Guillermo del Toro is continuing to capitalize on his current spot as one of the few go-to guys for film fantasy of the fairy tale type, albeit with more of the original menace restored that decades of child-shielding do-gooders had filtered out like so many focus groups… which isn't to say that the Hollywood process doesn't ultimately filter some of it back out again in time for the climax.

Here del Toro, working with Hellboy/B.P.R.D. (Bureau of Paranormal Research & Defense) creator Mike Mignola, has taken a fairy tale told to a child and seen it some true for the same child… albeit in this case decades later. If you've seen the trailers you have the central plot: A disgruntled fairy prince returns to reclaim his birthright and break an ancient truce between his race and the humans who don't even recall it. To that end he seeks to reactivate a Golden Army of enchanted, clockwork soldiers some 4900 ("seventy times seventy") strong; a sort of nuclear option his father had taken some pains to keep from being used again after having seen how easy it was to deliver death through such unstoppable, amoral instruments. Hellboy and his crew, as the story essentially writes itself, are pulled in and tasked with stopping this supernatural uprising.

Such surprises as the film provided were mostly human touches provided by the characters, along with some wonderful tastes of sometimes terrible fantasy realms existing alongside our own. The central plot and that of the key relationships in the film are beyond predictable, transcending that to a level of inevitability. While I prefer that to a screenplay written with an insistence that there must be "twists" even if no good ones offer themselves for consideration, it could make for a less engaging story than it might if you lose sight of this being a fairy tale at its core.

We have menace, pathos, and several generally endearing characters. We have a couple of romances, some fairly well-assured tragedy, some conflict for the title character as he has reason to see that he may have more in common with his foes than the world of humans he's protecting, and we have dire portents concerning both Liz Sherman & Hellboy and Hellboy's destiny – that last a central element from the earlier film.

Ron Perlman, if anything, seems even more relaxed in the title role than he did four years ago, and Selma Blair gets to play a happily more self-possessed Liz Sherman this time out, having had some time to become more comfortable in her own, fire-friendly skin.

Doug Jones reprised his role as the aquatic brains of the local B.P.R.D. organization, Abe Sapien, and this time he was able to provide his own voice instead of finding himself overdubbed by David Hyde Pierce as he was in the earlier film. It works well, and as one would expect allowed for a cleaner performance.

Stepping in as the new split-cast character – someone performed physically by one person and the voice provided by another – is the cloud of ectoplasm contained in a suit somewhere between an old diving suit and Robby the Robot, is Johann Kraus. Physical actors/interpreters John Alexander and James Dodd provide the motions while cartoon mogul Seth MacFarlane provides an occasionally over-the-top German voice. In the film they've decided to make him more of a casual user of his containment suit than he is in the comics, where it's essential to keeping him from drifting away.

A minor distraction in the film is actor Luke Goss, who through no fault of his own, especially under his makeup as the piece's villain, Prince Nuada, kept looking like Tom Cruise. Fortunately Goss didn't see fit to deliver his lines in as arch a manner as Cruise likely would have.

This one's off to a solid financial start, though, and seems reasonably assured another sequel as far as the backers are concerned. As del Toro will be disappearing into New Zealand for most of the next few years to work on The Hobbit, it's uncertain how much this franchise is to be considered as being on hold.