Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army arrived in 2008 as a sequel to his own 2004 Hellboy, and it carries the confidence of a director who knows exactly what he wants on screen. Ron Perlman returns as the demon agent who works for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, and the film pits him against an elven prince named Nuada who wants the world back for his magical kindred. The premise is simple. The execution is not.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
The Golden Army’s Crown and the Prince Who Wants It
The film opens during Christmas 1955, when a young Hellboy hears a bedtime story from his adoptive father, Trevor Bruttenholm. The story concerns an ancient war between humans and magical creatures, and a goblin blacksmith who offers Balor, king of the elves, an indestructible mechanical army. Balor’s son, Prince Nuada Silverlance, pushes him to accept. When the Golden Army devastates humanity, Balor regrets it and forms a truce with the humans. Nuada leaves the elf kingdom in exile. The crown that commands the army — wearable only by one of royal blood — is split into three pieces.
That backstory is the engine of the whole film, and del Toro, who wrote the screenplay from a story he co-wrote with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, does not waste it. In the present day, Nuada gathers the pieces. He takes the first at an auction by unleashing tooth fairies that eat the crowd. He kills his father for the second. His twin sister, Princess Nuala, escapes with the third.
Luke Goss plays Nuada, and he is the best thing in the movie. The prince is not a ranting villain. He has a grievance, and the film lets him state it. During a fight, Nuada questions why Hellboy fights for humans at all. That question lands because the film has spent its first act showing Hellboy chafing under the secrecy the B.P.R.D. demands.
Perlman, Blair, and the Team Krauss Takes Over
Perlman’s Hellboy is a known quantity by now, but the sequel gives him more to push against. Del Toro described the character’s dilemma this way: “[He] has always fought on the side of humans, but this [fantasy of destruction] pushes his buttons to reconsider.” That tension is the film’s spine. Hellboy dislikes operating in secret, and when he investigates the auction slaughter, he lets himself be revealed to the world.
Selma Blair returns as Liz Sherman, the pyrokinetic B.P.R.D. member and Hellboy’s girlfriend. Blair said she wanted a different Liz this time. “In the first one she was afraid to take a step,” she said. “She was completely a zombie, not wanting to own up to her power and having the memory of what she’d created in her life… I was really eager to come and play Liz with a little more vibrancy.” Blair cut her hair short for the role, avoiding the long hair from the first film, which she felt “brought her face down.”
The change works. Blair plays Liz as someone looking forward rather than backward, and the film hands her a secret — Abe Sapien discovers she is pregnant, and she swears him to secrecy. It is a quiet thread in a loud movie, and it gives the ending something to pull on.
Doug Jones pulls triple duty as Abe Sapien, the Chamberlain, and the Angel of Death. Jones said of returning to Abe: “He’s been an absolute treat for me to play this time. He’s written with so many different colours and levels and there’s a love int—” The source cuts off there. Abe does find Nuala, who holds the map to the Golden Army, and falls in love with her. Anna Walton plays Nuala, and the romance between a fish-man and an elf princess is played straight, which is the only way it could work.
Jeffrey Tambor returns as Tom Manning, and John Hurt returns as Trevor Bruttenholm. Seth MacFarlane voices Johann Krauss, the ectoplasmic medium brought in to rein Hellboy in after Manning’s superiors lose patience. John Alexander and James Dodd also play Krauss. Brian Steele plays Wink, a cronie, a spice shop troll, a cathedral head, and a Fragglewump — a sentence that tells you more about this film’s imagination than any plot summary could.
The Troll Market Under the Brooklyn Bridge
With Krauss in charge, the team tracks the tooth fairies to a secret troll market under the Brooklyn Bridge. This sequence is the film’s high point. Del Toro fills the market with creatures that have no business sharing a frame, and the effect, to my eye, is a world that feels lived in rather than designed. It is the kind of scene that justifies the whole production budget.
Hellboy fights and kills Wink there. He also fights an elemental forest god that Nuada summons against him. The forest god sequence is the film’s other visual peak, a creature of green growth and ruin. These set pieces are why the film earned its Oscar nomination for Best Makeup at the 81st Academy Awards. That nomination is not a consolation prize. The makeup and creature work here are, in this paper’s view, the film’s argument for itself.
The action is clean and readable, which is not a given in 2008 superhero cinema. Del Toro shoots his creatures so you can see them, and the film runs 120 minutes without a sag in the middle, as far as this paper is concerned. That is a tighter cut than the genre usually manages.
What the Golden Army Actually Delivers
The film grossed $168.3 million against a production budget of $82.5–85 million. That is a solid return, and it came with generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the fantasy atmosphere as well as Perlman and the rest of the cast. The film is a sequel to Hellboy (2004) and the second live-action film in the franchise, based on the Dark Horse Comics character created by Mignola.
The tagline is “Believe it or not… He’s the good guy.” It is a good tagline for a film that keeps asking whether Hellboy should be.
The franchise was rebooted in 2019 with a new film simply titled Hellboy, released by Lionsgate. That film was a critical and commercial failure. A second reboot was announced in 2023, titled Hellboy: The Crooked Man, which itself was a critical and commercial disappointment. The source does not say why the second reboot followed the first, only that it did. The del Toro version remains, in this paper’s judgment, the one that worked.
“He’s been an absolute treat for me to play this time.”
Where the Sequel Stands
Here is the thing about Hellboy II: The Golden Army. It is a sequel that, in this paper’s view, improves on its predecessor in almost every way that matters, and it still did not get a third film from del Toro. The 2008 release date of July 11 put it in a summer that had no shortage of superhero options, and it held its own. The $168.3 million gross is not a franchise-killer on its own. The franchise died anyway.
What the film gets right is tone. Del Toro treats the magical creatures as a people with a legitimate complaint, not as monsters to be cleared out. Nuada’s argument — that humans took the world and left his kind to hide — is not refuted by the film so much as answered by Hellboy’s choice to keep fighting for the humans anyway. That is a more interesting position than most superhero films take, and it is why the character’s dilemma, as del Toro put it, pushes his buttons.
What the film gets wrong, to this paper’s mind, is scale. The Golden Army itself, the indestructible mechanical force the whole plot revolves around, arrives late and does less than the buildup promises. The crown, the map, the three pieces — all of it is machinery to get to a finale that is more about Nuala and Nuada than about the army. That is a defensible choice. It is also a slightly deflating one.
The Cast Carries Hellboy II
The cast is the reason to watch. Perlman owns the role, Blair gets more to do than in the first film, and Jones makes Abe the film’s secret weapon. Goss gives Nuada real weight. MacFarlane’s vocal turn as Krauss adds a dry comic edge that the film needs.
The film is not perfect, in this paper’s view. The Golden Army is underused, and the middle section leans on Krauss’s authority conflict longer than it needs to. But the troll market, the elemental, and the makeup work are enough to carry it. This is a sequel that knows what it is and does it well.
KEY FACTS BOX
- Title: Hellboy II: The Golden Army
- Release date: July 11, 2008 (United States)
- Director: Guillermo del Toro
- Writers: Guillermo del Toro, from a story he co-wrote with Mike Mignola
- Runtime: 120 minutes
- Genres: Fantasy, Action
- Gross: $168.3 million
- Production budget: $82.5–85 million
- Metacritic: 78/100
- Score: 7.8/10
- Awards: Best Makeup nomination, 81st Academy Awards
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