HELLBOY: THE GOLDEN ARMY (2006)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

HELLBOY 2 picks up some time after the conclusion of the first film, which ended, in part, with the decision of Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) to accept Hellboy (Ron Perlman) as her lover. Guillermo Del Toro, who wrote an original story with the franchise's creator Mike Mignola, is careful to follow through on all the emotional beats established for the hero and his cast of support characters, including amphibious Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and fastidious manager Manning (Jeffrey Tambor). Unfortunately, I don't think Del Toro paid nearly as much attention to the main conflict of his story.

The first HELLBOY had a rough unity, in that the hero loses his adoptive father therein and then must overcome a sort of "bad father," an occultist who brought the young demon into the Earth-plane. The conflict once again has apocalyptic consequences for the survival of mankind, but Del Toro's script fails to give his basic idea any deep resonance, and I give the film a fair mythicity only for its romance-elements with respect to both Hellboy and Abe Sapien. 

It seems that in antiquity there was a great battle in which archaic humans attempted, for reasons unknown, to exterminate all the various supernatural beings of Earth, such as trolls, ogres and fairies. Balor (Roy Dotrice), King of Faerie, has his smiths create an unstoppable army of golden clockwork soldiers (not fully seen until the film's last half hour). This "golden army" decimates the human forces, who are saved only because compassionate Balor spares the race. A truce is forged between the humans and their supernatural opponents, and it endures until the early 21st century.

Contemporary humans are only marginally aware that supernatural entities still exist-- except for those working for the B.P.R.D., such as Hellboy-- and it's dubious as to whether any of them even remember the truce. But surprisingly, it's a Prince of Faerie, Nuada (Luke Goss), who decides that he wants to activate the Golden Army and expunge humankind. Why? He references human expansion and their repugnant "shopping malls," but clearly Del Toro didn't bother giving his villain a strong motive. In any case, Balor doesn't want to make war on humans, so his son kills him. Nuada's twin sister Nuala (Anne Watson), despite her somewhat diffident affection for her brother, flees the faerie court with a device Nuada needs in order to activate the killer robots.

I'm not clear on why Nuada releases various boogiemen into the Earth-plane, such as a swarm of tiny horrors called "tooth fairies." That might make sense if Nuala was hiding on Earth, but we later learn she's hiding in a corner of Faerie called "the troll market." It looks like the only reason for various monsters to show up on Earth is so that the B.P.R.D. has something to investigate, and so that Hellboy and his buddies have someone to fight. The incursions cause the occult-hunters to check out the troll market, find Nuala, get the lowdown on Nuada's plans, and start making counter-plans. Oh, and both Nuala and Abe Sapien fall for each other. (There's a very light incestuous current between the twins, mostly evidenced on Nuada's side, but Del Toro does not develop this element dramatically.)

Instead of building up the main menace, the director piles on the workplace drama and comedy. In addition to various flareups from Liz (who has a bun in her oven and doesn't know it initially), Hellboy also has to cope with a new commander. This is Johann Kraus, essentially a ghost who speaks with a German accent despite inhabiting a suit of armor. Krauss, ostensibly based on a separate Mignola character, adds some good tension to the mix, but regrettably he also supplies more evidence that Del Toro was more taken with doing his character-scenes than with building up the plot.

In contrast to most other cinematic menaces, the invincible Golden Army, or a couple of soldiers thereof, are only activated for a few minutes, which doesn't help to sell them as a major danger. Hellboy, after coping with a near-death wound, enjoys a climactic duel with Nuada. But though he saves the world from the Golden Army, his victory costs Abe his first love.

Even when I saw ARMY in a theatre, I was underwhelmed. However, in 2006 it made a substantial profit, so obviously the audience as a whole liked it, and even critics were reasonably positive. Yet for the next thirteen years up until the 2019 reboot of the franchise, Del Toro couldn't get a sequel greenlighted. I speculate that some unfathomable office politics kept HELLBOY III from happening. According to Del Toro's statements, he might have followed through on some of the ideas alluded to in the first film, regarding Hellboy's special destiny. But there's no knowing if that take would have been good. Wiki supplied a writeup of other ideas Del Toro considered for Number Two before settling on the clockwork army, and all of those ideas seem fairly pedestrian. I'm clearly in the minority in my preference for the 2019 effort, since that film flopped at the BO. Still, all the "special destiny" tropes are still ripe for harvesting, so Del Toro's failure to pursue that notion doesn't mean it will never be realized.