Happy-Go-Lucky

Flash of Genius

Eagle Eye

Ghost Town

The Duchess

Hounddog

Burn After Reading

Hamlet 2

The House Bunny

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Elegy

Bottle Shock

Hollywood blockbusters tend to steamroll the individuality and quirkiness out of anyone involved. That's partly why Johnny Depp got heaped with praise for being brilliantly and flamboyantly out there despite the mechanical grandiosity of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Robert Downey Jr., similarly, mined gold out of an entertaining but pretty standard superhero origin flick, Iron Man. Into this summer of shiny, noisy, numbingly impersonal flicks flies a hot, unruly, wildly imaginative breath of fresh air, Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Sure, it's a big, effects-laden fantasy epic, but it's also so darkly funny, odd, hip, heartfelt and spectacularly visionary that it could only be the brainchild of writer-director Guillermo del Toro, who, more than in the first Hellboy, goes even wilder, deeper and more idiosyncratic in translating to the big screen Mike Mignola's offbeat superhero comics.

The movie kicks off by chucking us right into the thick of things and scarcely lets up. Albino sword- and spear-wielding elf prince Nuada (Luke Goss), hoping to unleash the might of a dormant horde of golden robots, emerges from the underworld to wage ultimate war on planet-plundering humanity. This sequel also introduces new characters, including vaporous protoplasmic sage Johann Krauss (embodied by John Alexander; voiced by Seth McFarlane). As with the first Hellboy, plotting may not be this movie's great strength, but there are pleasures to make up for it in major ways. One major gob of glue that holds the Hellboy movies together is the indispensable Ron Perlman who is even looser and more offhanded than he was in Hellboy as the muscle-bound, red-skinned, Tecate-swilling, cigar-chomping, short-fused butt-kicker who leads a band of paranormal do-gooders, including live-in pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair, playing it with sullen charm) and the aquatic psychic empath Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) in an all-out effort to save mankind, whether or not judgmental, ungrateful, thick-headed mankind is actually worth saving.

This is a movie -- a feast, really -- packed with showstoppers, including a sequence involving a terrifying, faceless, winged Angel of Death and another set in a bizarre underground market of phantasmagorical freaks who look like they crawled, flew and levitated out of del Toro's magnificent Oscar-winner Pan's Labryrinth. What sends the movie into the stratosphere is the visionary weirdness and humanity that del Toro crams in along the margins, like keeping Hellboy and Liz too busy fighting enemies to resolve their interpersonal battles, a bravura attack by hordes of tiny carnivorous flying fairies, or having Hellboy and Abe drunkenly tear into a sappy Barry Manilow song just before they're called in to hellacious battle. Is there any director more golden right now than del Toro? Until a greater, more beautiful and thrilling fantasy epic than Hellboy II: The Golden Army comes around, we'd have to say no.

by Stephen Rebello

credit: Egon Endrenyi/©2008 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.