Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
Centuries ago, humanity and the magical world made a truce after the humans were almost wiped out by an unstoppable army lead by the king of the elves. The Elve king, was so ashamed of the acts of the army that he wanted peace and as such both civilizations would go their own way. Only the elve prince Nuada wasn’t complete in agreement with the pact as he didn’t trust the humans and therefore he decided to leave to never be seen again.
Current day: Nuada is back as he believes the humans have violated the pact and steals a part of the golden crown that’s used to control the golden army. He wants to take control over it and see the end of humanity with only Hellboy capable of stopping him.
Sound and Vision:
Certain scenes lack some detail here and there and also some of the special effects aren’t as sharp as they could be but it looks to be done intentionally so we won’t hold it against the transfer too much. For the rest we get excellent image quality that is up to par with the release of the first movie which was done by Sony.
The 7.1 surround track does an excellent job with plenty of detail and lots of use of the surround speakers and subwoofer. Things come out of all channels very aggressively without ever becoming chaos. Excellent!
Extras:
- Audio Commentary tracks
- Hellboy: In Service of the Devil
- Production Workshop
- Preproduction
- Marketing Campaign
- Troll Market Tour
- Deleted Scenes
- Animation Zinco Epilogue
Conclusion:
Hellboy 2 continues in the line that was laid out in the first movie. Hellboy is fed up with living in hiding so does everything he can to be spotted by the media and when this finally happens things turn out a bit different than expected. As such everything still is pretty much ok but then things turn for the worse: the character of Johann Krauss is plain stupid and in the middle of the movie we get a singing scene that doesn’t seem to end. Did Guillermo Del Toro smoke a joint or so? Hellboy suddenly turns from a cool cigarre-smoking action hero into a blabbering drunk emo-type and nothing from that point on manages to make up for this mistake.
Hellboy 2 does offer some good action scenes and manages to entertain at times but overall it’s definitely not up to par with the first movie. Let’s hope part 3 does a better job.
6.0