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PUTNAM NEWS
Billy Summers: 'Improved' Hellboy II pretty much seems more of the same
Ya want proof you don't have to be a pretty boy to survive in Hollywood? Think Ron Perlman.
Okay, he's not up there with Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford, but the star of both "Hellboy" and the new "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" is making a good living starring in major motion pictures, not to mention being the star of a legendary television series in the late '80s.
There are a whole bunch of cute waiters/would be actors who would love to have that on their resumes.
True, it was also the romantic storyline and great dialogue that made "Beauty & the Beast" a TV hit back in the "big hair" days. But you had to admit, any guy who can become a romantic icon while dressed as a feline and living in the sewers of New York, definitely has his act together.
The guy with the unusual looking face keeps on bringing it, with Guillermo del Toro's sequel to the 2004 hit "Hellboy," based on the comic book hero of the same name.
The main problem with the new and improved version is that it isn't all that new, and not very much improved. It seemed to me to be pretty much "more of the same."
The plot is a top-secret government organization of mutants are called on to fight off bad-guy strange beings and save the world. It's only been done two million times before (almost half a million, just this year).
While the first movie had the added subplot of Hellboy's origin, "Hellboy II" doesn't even give you this. A new back-up mutant with a mysterious past would have been nice.
The bad guy this time is a demonic elf prince (played by Luke Goss) who kills his father and breaks a centuries-old truce between mankind and the "things that go bump in the night." He wants to rule the Human world and is calling forth an army of mechanical meanies to do his bidding.
Luke Goss is one of those pretty boy actors I mentioned earlier, who has been in about two dozen things in the past eight years, nothing you would remember, character and movie alike.
The rest of the cast is about as boring. Both of Hellboy's closest companions, fish-man Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and torch-woman Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) return but seem to just stand back and watch Perlman work, occasionally jumping in when needed as a body to bounce dialogue off of.
Jeffrey Tambor, who again plays Hellboy's government bureaucrat/handler Tom Manning, is so one-dimensional that I kept expecting him to be called back into the squad room of "Hill Street Blues" to defend a suspect, between Hellboy scenes.
As Hellboy's flame (pun intended), Selma Blair has even less to do in this movie than the first, as her Liz Sherman character basically spends the time nagging Hellboy and questioning her reasons for cohabitating with a big-red demon who is such a self-centered male that he makes Al Bundy looked "whipped."
But at the end of the movie (SPOILER ALERT!!!), surprise, she's pregnant with twins! Can you spell "H-e-l-l-b-o-y J-r." boys and girls?
All in all, the movie is worth seeing on a week that is weak on entertainment (and last week was), but if they had put it up against anything except "Meet Dave," it would have died a quicker death.
If you're heading out the door to the movies, unless the original "Hellboy" really took your breath away, try something other than "Hellboy II" -- you'll thank me for it.
Billy Summers is a freelance photographer who reviews films for the Putnam Herald. He can be reached at summers855@verizon.net.
