Hellboy II: The Golden Army: B+

There's a revelation about a life beginning near the end of Hellboy II. And just as the first act is getting going there's a running gag about relationships and their various tensions; the same goes for the second act...and the third. And somewhere in there -- a drunken duet serenading and bemoaning star-crossed love with all its joys and sorrows. Such details, so dry and domesticated in their objectivity, must sound odd to anyone who has actually seen the film because, oh yeah, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is just that: a big red brute of a protagonist with shorn-off horns and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. That's writer-director Guillermo del Toro's great big ghoulish joke, though: that each of his spiny, many-legged (and eyed), creepy, crawly creatures is as relatable and worthy of his camera as those All-American comic-book Joes. Spider-Man? Only if he has wings. And scales.

The source material of del Toro's sequel, Mike Mignolia's Dark Horse comic, says that Hellboy and his various compatriots live and work with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, their sole activity being, as Hellboy's pa so aptly summed up in Hellboy "to bump back" at the creatures that bumped in the night. And so, for the first film, they did. Except the "creatures" were mostly Nazi's...and the occasional assasin fueled by sand. Nothing too extraordinary, really. But freed by financial and critical kudos -- and lauching off from his last film, the lusciously dark, full-blooded, and tragic fairy tale Pan's Labyrinth -- del Toro is more content this second go round to fill the screen, and plot, with any manner of organisms. He harnesses the power of cinema to make his imagination manifest, and the glory of it all is that he does it so well that the conflict between humans and the otherwordly Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) who wants to exterminate them that is the narrative center of The Golden Army whizzes by on the brawny, brainy, synapses of his creativity that burble just below the surface of every sequence.

Nazis weren't the only thing shorn-off as so much dead weight; John Meyers (Rupert Evans), the FBI newbie who "babysat" Hellboy in the first film, has been unceremoniously written out, and his straight-man mugging is briefly missed. Then Jeffrey Tambor, beefing up his role as a bigwig from the last movie, steps foot onto the screen, and his comic timing (honed to a razor sharp point on Arrested Development) quickly makes up for it. So, too, does the rest of the cast in this more lavishly created film make the experience all the richer. Selma Blair, as Hellboy's true love, makes her quasi-acrid exasperation both funny and lethal: the physical manifestation of her pyrokinectic abilities. Doug Jones, the director's consummate performer of wierd, is all the more welcome as the painfully polite and sincere Abe Sapien. And of course, Ron Pearlman, as the devil himself, gives a performance of finely-wrought comedy and grace; he's the clown laughing through a tear or two -- a muscle-head with brains and a heart, too.

In what may prove to be the most successful film yet of his career, Guillermo del Toro playfully (and with great deftness) touches on the truth behind each glam facade; he peers behind the metaphorical make-up and costumes on these otherwordly heroes. But instead of entreating us with their massive pathos, he puckishly points at their hum-drums woes and desires, saying with a big ol' smirk, "See: there can be a summer blockbuster at once visually rich and dramatically quaint." Such a philosophy lends The Golden Army it's occasionally needed heft. But really, most of the time the audience will just be bugging their eyes out -- in one scene at the towering plant god that blossoms into a city-block's worth of foliage; in another at the little old lady who happens to eat cats for funs -- and then giggling at the very things that set their eyes popping. It's a grand trick for a blockbuster that's just rote enough to be irksome, while being just grand enough to make even the Satan himself happy.