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Movie Review, Hellboy II
The movie starts off far more funny than the first Hellboy. This is very much in keeping with the quirky ad campaign that has been promoting the film (the inside the actor's studio commercial for example is quite funny). Hellboy is once again Ron Pearlman- the genius bit of casting that made the first movie so great is a huge win for any sequel. He's tired of working for the BPRD in secret and is going out of his way to be spotted by the real world. But a mythos of ancient elves is working to retrieve and unify some widgets to awaken a golden army of indestructible robots, and it's up to our heroes to stop it from happening.
The elven world is very much Del Toro's designs. Likewise, an extended sequence through a secret troll market hidden under the brooklyn bridge gives him a great canvas to paint his stylistic genius. And seeing the big and clumsy Hellboy smash through it is incredibly satisfying. The action sequences are all excellent, and the final robot battle is very fun and well done.
All the while this is done with some nice plot twists for the major characters. A love interest for Abe comes along. A new good guy is sent in from the BPRD to reign in our uncontrollable hero: Krauss is voiced by Seth Macfarlane basically doing his fish char from American Dad, but inside a wacky suit controlled by ectoplasm vapors. Selma Blair is back as Liz: they give her some good lines and a few good sequences, but she's mainly a support role.
So Guillermo Del Toro was able to work within Mike Mignola's world. He put his own thumbprints all over the work, and the whole comes out better than the sum of the parts. And this makes me all the more excited for the Hobbit, where I have all the same concerns: Tolkein and Jackson will give him even bigger shoes to fill, and now I think he can do it.
I went into it with high hopes, but was largely disappointed. It seemed to barely be about hellboy. While the visuals, background and world were interesting and appealing, they seemed to me to be a completely separate franchise, that very distinctly left the world created in the first one.
Thought the "new" character was an epic disappointment as well.
Felt like the director wanted to make a movie primarily about something else, and dragged hellboy along for the ride in a bit role.
Give Taco a break. His spell checker wanted to spell it "SQL".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Response to this movie is turning into two camps - love it or hate it.
I fall mildly into the 'hate it' camp. Too much of the director's vision, not enough freakin' story.
Underdeveloped characters, waaaaaaaaaaaay too much CGI, overly cluttered scenes, eco-terrorist plot. All adding up to me literally yawning my way through the movie.
The original movie appeals to me because of a strong story with supporting visual effects. This movie seems to be all about overwhelming visual effects with some story thrown in to try to pull them together.
If this is what Pan's Labyrinth is like then I'm glad I didn't waste my time in seeing it. I don't see the director as 'visionary' any more than I see M. Night Wasshisname as a visionary.
Harsh, I know. But I'm rather picky about how I spend my precious free time and wasting it on this movie just annoys me.
Which is stupid. When you browse to the Slashdot front page and see a story entitled, "Hellboy II review," you should assume that there will be details about Hellboy 2. If you're that sensitive to spoilers, you don't click. We should save the "contains spoilers" tag for serious discussions about plot points, not "may contain information about the subject matter."
Warning: This device contains matter, which is known by the state of California to cause warpage of space and time. This device also contains extraordinary amounts of stored energy in its physical matrix. Handle with care.
Hey, at least they're being honest.
Bah, they're being paranoid. Why don't they just engrave a message in our corneas that reads "Warning: Life causes Death."
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Iraq wasn't, Afghanistan was.
It was patriotic and "support the troops-ish" but it fit the material. Tony Stark is an arms manufacturer and those are the current wars being fought where his wares might turn up. If you're going to set this material in current events then Afghanistan and Iraq are the places you put it.
I liked the movie a lot and thought the overt patriotism fit right into the film perfectly. I don't know if I'd give it a 100 but back in my time you had to get a 93 or better to make an "A" and I'm good with that. Mid 90's seems about right for Iron Man to me.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Just to show it's all a matter of perspective, I saw it as a rather UNpatriotic don't-support-the-troops kind of movie. It seemed to show war as always bad, the defense industry as crooked and evil, the war in Afghanistan pointless (we couldn't even stop the massacre in this one small town!). Also, the Iron Man saga always starts in a war-zone; it was Vietnam in the first issue, later revised to the first Gulf War, now Afghanistan. And I don't recall Iraq being in it at all. The story may have been "cheesy", but it was faithful to the comic book, more or less.
I don't want to start an argument or anything, but it just goes to show it's all a matter of opinion.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
If someone does that study, and finds the expected 100% correlation between life and death, the report of that study on /. will undoubtedly be greeted with "Correlation != causation" posts.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."