'Hellboy II' unfurls as demon-spawn sequel

It's crammed with whirring mechanical gears, lots of gooshy goop, fluttering buggy things and strange creatures with misplaced eyeballs.

Yep, it's another Guillermo del Toro movie for sure.

Four years ago, del Toro introduced Mike Mignola's comic book hero "Hellboy" to the silver screen. Ron Perlman played the demonlike titular hero, a satanic Nazi experiment that went good when kindly Professor Trevor Broom (John Hurt) rescued little Hellboy and raised him to be a nice guy, even though he looked like a tanning salon lawsuit.

Hellboy filed down his horns (so he'd look less demonic) and took a job with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, a top-secret organization dedicated to defending the U.S. from supernatural attacks. "Hellboy" was wild, imaginative and gave us an unusual hero who chomped on cigars, guzzled beer, loved kitties and packed an arsenal of heavy-duty weapons to keep his enemies in perpetual kaputness.

"Hellboy II: The Golden Army" does what most sequels tend to do, make everything bigger and noisier and messier and more action-packed than the original.

Again directed by del Toro, "Golden Army" succeeds on all those levels. As much I wanted to really like the character development (Hellboy is about to become a Helldad!), as much I wanted to ooooh and ahh over the epic spectacle of the 70-soldiers-times-70 Golden Army, this sequel merely amuses when it should thrill, mildly surprises when it should shock, and is way too much in love with its omnipresent special effects that almost become tediously unrelenting. At least the script, by del Toro and Mignola, ramps up the comedy to almost distracting levels.

Perlman returns as the hero, or "Red" as his incendiary girlfriend, human torch Liz Sherman (an increasingly distracted Selma Blair) likes to call him. They open the story by having a too-human heated domestic argument. Fellow federal abnormality Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), an empathetic amphibian creature, senses that Liz is pregnant, a development that she keeps from Hellboy and therefore textures scenes with extra meaning.

The Bureau gets called into action after a vampire-like, Hong Kong martial arts star wannabe called Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) interrupts a New York City auction and steals part of an ancient magical crown. He also unleashes a locust cloud of carnivorous fairies on the bidders, whose numbers are literally up.

Centuries earlier, Prince Nuada's mystical ancestors created a Golden Army, a mechanical fighting force so lethal against their human opponents that the creators mothballed the army and broke its power source, the crown, into three segments. Two were kept by Nuada's ancestors, and one went to the humans for safekeeping. Now, Nuada has two pieces and threatens his own sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), if she won't fork over the last piece she possesses and allow him to resurrect the Golden Army to wipe out humanity.

The Princess winds up in protective custody of the Bureau where, in a soppy comical development, Abe falls for her and starts playing Barry Manilow CDs.

In the funniest segment -- at least at Tuesday night's press screening -ˆ­- Abe and Hellboy get drunk and perform the stale comic cliche of "guys singing along with a pop CD." (Movies use this a lot because the public always falls for it; but it wins no points for originality or degree of difficulty.)

del Toro, whose career high so far remains the ambitiously dark fantasy "Pan's Labyrinth," is never short on imagination in "Golden Army," but the climactic reactivation of the titular military unit is an unexpectedly lackluster spectacle that makes us yearn for the simple charm of two freaky secret government agents yelling at each other like a sunburned Ralph Kramden and his main hottie.

"Hellboy II: The Golden Army"

Rating: 2½ stars (out of four)

Starring: Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor, Doug Jones, Anna Walton.

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro.

Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for violence, language. 110 minutes.

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