Sunday, July 13, 2008

Hellboy II Fails to Deliver (Spoilers)

I almost didn’t see this movie. I went to the mall for see it, and was checking the times, and almost bought a ticket for Iron Man instead. Yes, I’m getting old. However, watching that movie a second time would have been better than watching this movie. Hellboy number 1 was a better movie.

In movies like this, you need to tell the background information to the people watching. A good way to do this was by going back to when Hellboy was a kid, and having a story read to him. This made sense.

The movie just seemed to run a little slow for me. The opening part was good, with the story about the war between the humans and the elves. But, after that, it just moved too slow.

When Prince Nuada gets the third piece of the crown, why bother killing everyone at the auction house? Why bother showing his hand, before he gets a hold of the Golden Army? And the whole bit about them fighting the tooth fairy monsters I just could not believe. Seeing how small they were, and how many there were, I did not believe that they could kill them all. The movie could have been all about the fight between the world and the ravenous monsters. But, this was just to set up the next scene.

Prince Nuada wants to put the three parts of the crown back together, and fight the humans with the Golden Army. The elf King Balor tells the prince if he will not change his way, it will be death for him. The Prince asks his sister, Princess Nuala if she agrees, and she does. The prince then goes on to fight the solders, and eventually kill his father the King, to get his way. We find out later that the Prince and the Princess are twins, and what happens to one, happens to the other. So, if Nuala agreed that the prince should die, that she was ready to die, too. So, why did she not kill herself, to kill her brother? It would have made for a short movie, but since she does this at the end of the movie, what not at the beginning?

And why search out the map for the golden army? The sister knew that her brother would find her, so why find the map for him?

The ending battle against the golden army was too small. If the golden army was so big, and if they were going to restart the army in the movie, then it should have been a big battle against the humans and the army. By just having Hellboy and his friends fight the army, no one else will know what happened. Kind of boring, in my opinion.

But, I did like the first movie, and I do like the Hellboy character. I hope they make a third movie.

I suggest if you want to watch this movie, watch it on a hot day, and take advantage of the movie theater’s air-conditioning. Or wait for it to be released on DVD. Maybe just watch the trailer for now.

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