A black mark on the record of director Guillermo del Toro, whose record, which started out so clean with Cronos in his native Mexico and Mimic in the Hollywood system, looks now a bit ink-stained: Blade II, the first and second Hellboy, and nothing else that comes close to those first two. If the panegyrized Pan’s Labyrinth (immediately preceding) was itself overly clogged in its visuals, his present production has a lot more money, more graphic design, more CGI, more costumes, more makeup, etc., with which to be clogged. To try, amid the congestion, to pick out evidence of his personal obsessions with subterranean realms and creepy-crawly life forms has become a joyless, though not a fruitless, exercise. The pivotal scene in the movie, irksomely jokey already, is without doubt the drunken duet between the titular sunburned hero and his aquamarine sidekick, Abe, a lachrymose sing-along to Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile without You.” (The red man is having troubles with his combustible new bride — “I would give my life for her, but she also wants me to do the dishes” — and the blue man has a crush on a flaxen-haired, powder-faced fairy princess, the sister of a netherworld insurrectionist scheming to overthrow humanity.) Some sorts of viewers — the immature, the tasteless, the silly — will possibly see this scene as the highlight, but the more seasoned are sure to feel it disqualifies the movie from its subsequent ponderings of the destruction of mankind, the eternal tug-of-war between self-interest and the commonweal, and the would-be wrenching death scene at the climax. They are likely to feel further that it disqualifies the movie from subsequent sequels. With Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Luke Goss, and Anna Walton. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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