Now this is more like it.The Golden Army improves on the first Hellboy in basically every way. The boring characters from the first movie have all been jettisoned (they even joke about the fact that Hellboy got the milquetoast perspective character transferred to Antarctica) and the villains are vastly more interesting this time around. (Also, given that their main motivation is “Humanity sucks,” they’re basically the tragic heroes.) The effects are sharper, the creature design is way more del Toro-ish, and all of the characters have higher stakes. (Even quirky fish dude Abe Sapien gets an arc! And a love interest!)I’m not sure why this franchise is quite so fixated on bad guys who love to do excessively flippy shit with pointy weapons, but other than that I have zero complaints — except that del Toro never got to make his third Hellboy.
