"It's just a story, right, Pops?" asks Hellboy. Broom replies, "I'm sure you'll find out." Del Toro envisions the tale as the boy might see it, in an epic piece of puppet theater. Abstract, faceless forms act it out like marionettes without strings. Their simplicity is refreshing: The puppet-theater approach frees up your imagination. (Later, the onslaught of dazzling details shuts it down.) And this series' comedy of incongruity is never sharper than when Hellboy crawls under the covers like any Eisenhower-era tyke, sleeping with his toy six-shooter and waiting for Santa Claus.
If del Toro had stylized the rest of the film just as boldly, he might have made a fairy-tale masterpiece. Instead, it's a virtuoso special-effects blow-out with a few red-hot comedy bits. At the BPRD headquarters in Trenton, N.J., all is not well. The honeymoon is over for Hellboy and Liz, and he's more antagonistic than ever to the bureaucrat Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), who wants to keep the agency a secret (that's why they're in Trenton). With the BPRD in disarray, the third piece of the Golden Crown comes up for auction. Balor's son, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), who never agreed to the truce, heads into Manhattan to snatch the partial crown with the help of his troll, Mr. Wink (Brian Steele).
Del Toro imbues some early scenes with the off-the-cuff humor of Men in Black, especially a typical-day-in-the-office traveling shot that reveals every room in BPRD headquarters filled with diverse kinds of perturbed critters. When Hellboy succeeds in "outing" himself and the agency, the snippets of TV reporters and late-night comics ranks with Marvel Studios' satirical topicality: Jimmy Kimmel, as himself, quips, "Horns are never a good sign."
Best of all, a ticklish new character, the "protoplasmic mystic" Johann Krauss, is eerily omniscient and, thanks to Seth (Family Guy) MacFarlane's delightful vocal performance, hilariously genteel. Krauss considers himself an "Austrian gentleman." He rouses the jealousy of the beer-swilling, gun-toting, big-fisted Hellboy, even though Johann is nothing more than a mist in an elaborate, alien-looking spacesuit. They share a rollicking, ingenious fight in the BPRD locker room.
But as the film goes on, the spectacle swamps everything - and I do mean "swamps," because del Toro loves slithering species that look like they belong at the bottom of a bog. A crucial link joins Hellboy to Elfland's righteous King Balor: Each wishes to maintain personal honor and keep faith with humans, despite humanity's cruelty and fickleness. That connection often frays under the weight of all the computer-graphic imagery that del Toro piles on top of it.
