HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY

STARRING: Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Luke Goss, Thomas Kretschmann, Doug Jones, Luke Goss, Anna Walton, Brian Steele, Roy Dotrice, John Hurt
2008, 110 Minutes, Directed by: Guillermo del Toro

2004's Hellboy was a sprawling, mysterious, comical, slimy, and idiosyncratic monster movie. Hellboy II: The Golden Army has all of those qualities and one more: restraint. Well, at least a newfound sense of limitation; this sequel overdoses in a big way on fantasy tangents, yet, unlike the earlier picture, it clicks together with a greater, more direct geek panache.

On orders to keep his crimson mug out of the public eye, facing the domestic wrath of pyro-ready girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), and trying to console amphibious friend Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, in both body and voice this time out) as he explores love for the first time, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) has a full dance card of problems. When ancient royalty Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) rises up to seize control of a magical crown that controls the all-powerful robotic Golden Army, it's up to Hellboy and the BPRD to stop him. However, as the human-friendly demon gets closer to killing Nuada, he's forced to reconsider his place in the world, and where his allegiance truly lies.

It goes without saying these days that writer/director Guillermo del Toro has one of the most powerfully erect imaginations in the entertainment business. His insatiable desire for all things supernatural is a stunning obsession, leading to a career slanted toward the continual evocation of the unreal. The effective Blade II aside, Hellboy was truly del Toro playing in a conventional Hollywood sandbox, and it seemed to wear him down. For a film sporadically delightful and containing unforgettable characterization, Hellboy felt hopelessly immobile, losing itself entirely to the excesses of genre requirements in the final reel, stealing the small handfuls of glee almost accidentally left behind.

It's interesting to note that Golden Army is del Toro's first film since his 2006 triumph Pan's Labyrinth, and a familiar fantastical blood still courses through his veins. The new Hellboy adventure plays as though it was made by a man emboldened by his recent directorial choices, taking a beloved franchise and embracing it with every bit of love and newfound power he could muster. Golden Army is an uninhibited snapshot of del Toro's gummy ambitions, now allowed a proper big-ticket budget to imagine worlds beyond our own, creatures of every possible angle and temperament, and a threat worth summoning building-smashing bravery to fend off.

However, as boundless as del Toro's gusto is, he's still short a certain ability to rein all of his ideas in and sharpen his storytelling skills to a fine, effective point.

Golden Army loves its monsters: there are creatures stomping over nearly every frame of the film, filling this expanded world with a community of hostile outcasts to find a more suitable context for our hornless hero. The make-up and CG work in the film are outstanding, but it comes at a crushing price: it distracts del Toro. With a veritable Muppet Show of goblins and assorted blobs running around, the director becomes enamored with every Forrest Ackerman detour, often applying brakes to the film to monitor the horror, which effectively loosens the already threadbare tension of the film (the Nuada subplot is a dud). There's little doubt del Toro puts on one helluva show, but he's a kid in a candy store in every release, absent a specific discipline that could merge wondrous beastly expressions with a rigid pacing and exhaustive dramatics.

Can you imagine A New Hope set entirely inside the Mos Eisely cantina? Golden Army comes dangerously close to that unpleasant aesthetic too many times.

Once del Toro is pried away from his fiendish vices, Golden Army reveals itself to be a wonderfully touching character odyssey for Hellboy, as he struggles with his place among the humans, not to mention his difficulty expressing love for Liz. Perlman is just so positively perfect in this role that every scene with Hellboy that doesn't involve things going kablooey is a delight, furthering the soul-searching needed to temper the outrageousness of his exterior.

The director even manages to sneak in magnificent, beer-fuelled bonding time between Hellboy and Abe, refreshing the friendship between "Red" and "Blue," while also giving the fish-man a little more to do with a bizarre, yet quite fruitful romantic subplot. There's also a new boss for the BPRD in Johann Kraus, a steampunk-inspired creation who looks like a robot and speaks with a goofy Hogan's Heroes German accent (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), who brings fresh energy into the film. An energy that takes a good half of the movie to compute, but eventually falls into line with del Toro's exaggerated comedic beats.

I enjoyed Golden Army much more than the original Hellboy, but the concept still needs a fixation outside of ghouls and goblins. The moments that light up this sequel are the personal asides, infusing resplendent warmth that del Toro could manipulate even further for maximum investment. Surely Golden Army fulfils every sci-fi fantasy around, but watching Hellboy find his purpose, contemplate his newly complicated future, or recall his past (a lovely prologue shows the character a curious boy in a veritable Jean Shepherd Christmas card) is where the real awe of the premise is found, not by dancing the Monster Mash until your eyes bleed.

The Mummy - Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

STARRING: Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, John Hannah, Michelle Yeoh, Luke Ford, Isabella Leong and Anthony Wong Chau-Sang

2008, 112 Minutes, Directed by: Rob Cohen

The latest Mummy film, coming a full and unforgiving seven years after the last Mummy film, is actually not much of a film at all: it's a deafening, blinding department store Blu-ray demo reel that's spun wildly out of control. It takes a Herculean effort to be known as the least appetizing entry in the Mummy franchise, but then again, a studio isn't exactly fishing for quality when they hire Rob Cohen to direct.

Now retired from their adventuring days, Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn O'Connell (Maria Bello, replacing Rachael Weisz) watch as their son Alex (Luke Ford) continues on their reckless, globe-trotting ways. When Alex uncovers the lost tomb of Emperor Han (Jet Li) and his Terracotta Army, it reawakens the fierce ruler from the afterlife, sending him on a quest for immortality. With a new mummy on the prowl, Rick, Evelyn, Alex, nightclub owner Jonathan (John Hannah), and a spiritual warrior (Michelle Yeoh) team up to prevent Han from reaching Shangri-La and ruling the world with his infinite undead army.

Considering that 2001's Mummy Returns grossed more than its 1999 predecessor, it boggles the mind to consider how Universal Pictures just simply sat on their hands and watched the demand for a new chapter in the O'Connell family saga wither away through a miserable spin-off (2002's The Scorpion King) and the merciless passing of time. I mention the long absence because Tomb of the Dragon Emperor spends an inordinate amount of expositional time reminding the viewer what once lit up the imaginations of past summer movie-going crowds, as if completely panicked nobody will remember that once upon a time Brendan Fraser plus undead CG demons equalled box office gold.

While I was no fan of Mummy and downright loathed the wretched Returns, Tomb takes the franchise to a stunning new low. Director Rob Cohen (you know, the visionary who made Stealth, Fast and the Furious, and xXx) replaces Stephen Sommers here, and if there's one guy who could make Sommers appear as cinematically resonate as Spielberg, it's Cohen. As lead-footed a filmmaker as the factory churns out, Cohen picks up on the same beat of noise pollution that was left hanging in 2001, only he manages to craft a sequel more obnoxious and defeating than previously anticipated.

It's a rotten, stubborn directorial endeavour, and since Cohen has little appreciation for legitimate big screen magic, Tomb suffocates under the filmmaker's bile-slicked mandate that every single frame must contain a screaming or explosive element. Tomb is a hallow fireworks display (often literally), using the characters as anonymous action figures instead of trying to hammer out a decent narrative to employ their established appeal. The sense of archaeology and sun-baked puzzling from the previous films is rubbed out, as are the wide open spaces, replaced in Tomb with tight, unconvincing sets plucked right out of a Sci-Fi Channel Original.

Weisz probably made the right decision to bolt when she could, though her warmth and romantic glow is missed from the inert picture. Bello isn't a satisfying replacement; she's woefully miscast trying to match Fraser with limp quips and dreadfully-accented exhilaration, missing the doe-eyed fairy dust Weisz sprinkled before.

And speaking of replacements, how is the audience supposed to believe the pre-teen, thoroughly British Alex of Returns grows up to be a twentysomething American cowboy/tomb raider in the new film? Ford's dreadful attempt to swallow his native Australian accent doesn't help the transition. Neither does the fact that Fraser and Ford look like brothers, not father and son. Ah, but I'm sniffing around for logic, and that's the wrong course for a Mummy movie.

The Tomb journey sends the characters to the Himalayas, where they battle Han's goons with the help of a few towering Yeti (who apparently feed on a steady diet of American football), allowing Cohen to blow his sets up; to the streets of Shanghai, where Cohen can smash cars and blow them up; and finally the Chinese countryside, where Han's CG soldiers fight a different set of CG soldiers. And yes, Cohen blows more things up. The man loves all things that go boom. It's a repetitive cycle that pushes the actors to the background, even reducing Li and Yeoh to mere cameos (watch out, the marketing is deceptive) when those two icons should've been front and center for the entire run of the film.

The world didn't need a third Mummy motion picture, and it certainly didn't need one that descends further into mindless action and insipid screenwriting. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a terrible film, but even more insidious, it makes one wish for the good old days: when Stephen Sommers found time to ruin summer entertainment through his own brand of blaring, big screen misery; when the mummy was played by a doughy, hairless, spray-tanned, completely unthreatening South African actor; and when Brendan Fraser was actually considered a humorous presence by a select few.

There's the magic of Rob Cohen for you: he makes one extraordinarily nostalgic for the awful . . .

BABYLON A.D.

Babylon A.D. is Vin Diesel’s entire career in microcosm. He starts out as a gritty, amoral, selfish murderer a la Pitch Black, gets in a few car chases, pulls off some X-Games stunts, attempts some dramatic stuff which never really works, gets all sci-fi with confusing futuristic plot exposition, and by the end he’s morphed into The Pacifier, a glorified babysitter who has given up his guns for polo shirts and awkwardness with kids. As with every recent Vin Diesel project, when the credits roll, you’ll kick yourself for having been suckered into watching yet another one of his crummy movies.

The one thing all bad Vin Diesel movies have in common is that the film’s problems are never actually his fault. Vin delivers his usual solid, gruff performance in Babylon A.D., but the movie doesn’t deserve him. The film’s director Mathieu Kassovitz has already come out and blamed this disaster on studio interference, and that may be the case. I’m not here to assign blame though, simply to review what shows up on screen. What we have here is a mess.

It starts well enough, with Vin wandering around in a near-future Eastern Europe which looks a lot like the 80s near-future Detroit from Robocop. Vin is a mercenary named Toorop, hired to smuggle a girl named Aurora and her nun caretaker Rebeka into America. The set off through Russia, planning to sneak across the Bering Straight into Canada, even though the Bering Straight connects Russia to Alaska. Perhaps in the future Alaska has been conquered by the Canucks, there’s no real explanation for that or most of the sillier conceits going on in the movie.

The thing is, the closer they get to America the more the movie’s plot starts to stink. Whether it’s because Fox’s lawyers chopped the film to bits or because the script is piece of junk, I can’t tell you. All I can say is that with every step Vin Diesel takes, the less the movie makes sense and the less you want to hang around and see where it ends up. It’s a baffling film, one minute Toorop is a me first, work for the highest bidder killer, the next a guy with a bag of money drops out of the sky (literally) and he decides he’s no longer interested in his own life and chooses to walk off into certain death for someone he doesn’t know and has no reason to care about. Toorop morphs from cynical badass to stupid pussy for no apparent reason, and we’re supposed to buy it.

Even with its completely inconsistent characters, Babylon A.D. might have been sort of fun. In fact it is, for the first 40 or 50 minutes. There’s some mildly entertaining action sequences, done with average stunts and practical effects. It feels like you’re watching a particularly well executed episode of post apocalyptic thriller on the Sci Fi channel. At some point though, the fun stops and it becomes such a total mess that all you can do is laugh at it. The movie has no idea how to wrap things up and even worse, no idea how to explain any of what’s been going on. There’s some mumbo jumbo about virgin births which never amounts to anything, and some vague allusions to a cultish, corporate religion, but not enough explanation to connect the dots between any of it. I still have no idea why we were following around most of the people in this movie, and I don’t know that the actors in it do either. If they don’t know what they’re doing, then it’s doubtful you will. Don’t bother buying a ticket.

Artifacts

The Movie:

Who is this?

It's me. It's you.

Lionsgate has been a boon for genre fans these last few years as the distributor has provided a steady stream of unusual low budget horror and suspense films. Many of them are awful, yes, but at the same time, other titles have been entertaining, offering interesting storylines and characters one doesn't often see in mainstream films.

Artifacts, a 2007 Belgian science fiction thriller, falls in the latter category. It's one of the best direct-to-video releases I've seen this year (from any company, not just Lionsgate) and a flick I'd definitely recommend to others - despite one major flaw.

Artifacts centers upon Kate, a 28-year-old career woman who is drawn into a paranoid and surreal ordeal as her friends are murdered - by themselves. It seems that each major character in this film has a mysterious doppelganger bent on terminating them. Unlike the alien duplicates in Jack Finney's classic science fiction story The Body Snatchers, however, these doppelgangers seem uninterested in assuming the identities of their twins. Kate goes quickly on the run with her ex-lover, who also appears to be targeted, and the duo tries to puzzle out what's happening to them. They also learn they have mysterious metallic artifacts (hence the title of the film) buried under their ribs.

There are many aspects of Artifacts to compliment. For one thing, despite its low budget roots, the movie looks professionally done. This is especially true of the acting, which often hinders other B-movies. Mary Stockley is very good as the heroine Kate. She can act - which helps. She's attractive yet she carries a maturity and intelligence that lends credibility to her character. It's a surprisingly strong performance. The other cast members don't let her down either - although this movie is definitely Kate's story so no other character really stands out.

The plot is compelling and engaging - and with a runtime of 75 minutes, Artifacts never seems bloated with unnecessary scenes. Its score is compelling and unusual. And while there are a few bloody scenes, Artifacts derives most of its scares from ambience and tense build-up. This is really more of a suspense film with science fiction trappings than a horror movie per se. As usual, Lionsgate provides deceptive cover art for their release of this movie.

The downside to this film is its ending - which is decidedly ambiguous and open-ended. I think many viewers invested in this film will be disappointed that a lot of questions remain unanswered.

The open-ended conclusion of the film was deliberate - writer / producer / director team Giles Daoust and Emmanuel Jespers discuss their reasoning in a surprisingly in-depth documentary (discussed further in the Extras portion of this review). As it is, Artifacts is a compelling and swiftly-paced flick, and I certainly wouldn't mind returning for a sequel, especially if it continues with the Kate character played by Mary Stockley.

Highly recommended.