Hell Yes!

As a young kid, I had a poster of Ron Perlman on my closet. Admittedly, it was as Vincent from Beauty and the Beast, the tall, smart, romantic, secret-underground-land-dwelling cat/man who could have appealed more to a pubescent girl only by riding a horse and dispensing chocolate. But this early exposure gave me a fondness for the man's work, from the polyglot hunchback in The Name of the Rose to his scariest role of all in The Last Supper: a Rush Limbaugh clone.

And so it was that seeing Hellboy II gave me the chance to do two things I'd been wanting to do: catch up on Ron Perlman's oeuvre and see the faerieland of Guillermo del Toro's imagination without having to rent Pan's Labyrinth and sob like an infant. And it was good.

The first Hellboy took us in the Judeo-Christian direction you'd expect for a movie with the devil's kid in it; the sequel takes us in a decidedly more pagan direction, as an elf prince* seeks to restart a war between the faerie people and the humans. Fortunately for the humans, the BPRD's motley collection of characters--Hellboy, the amphibious Abe Sapien (imagine the spawn of C3PO and a mermaid), and fire controller Liz among them--are out to stop him. Into this plot del Toro manages to weave a lot of messages about love, destiny versus free will, and the loss of wonder in the world.

Which leads me to say that in my opinion, the latter message fell a bit flat. It's an interesting point that, with the fay folk dying out, the BPRD is aiding in the extinction of enchanted things from the past: however, we are reminded of this by the elf villain, Nuada, who keeps killing his own kind when it suits him and generally putting in harm's way the very things he's chiding Hellboy for destroying. And no one calls him on it, in a movie where very few characters are the soul of diplomacy. This is a minor irritant in a movie I otherwise loved, however, and fans of the first installment will be gratified to watch as our hero gets to fight more than one kind of monster. Still no dispensing chocolate, though.

*Elves. I don't know what Tolkien saw in them. But I digress.