It’s a weekend of underworld heroes, in all shapes and colours. An infernal brute fights off an underground horde in Hellboy II: The Golden Army; a trio of subterranean explorers go spelunking in the 3D depths of Journey to the Center of the Earth; and a young drug dealer scores pot from Jamaican gangsters beneath the streets of Manhattan in The Wackness. These movies are, respectively, a state-of-the-art supernatural fantasy, a corny family adventure, and a quirky coming-of-age picture. But they’re all guy movies. Each is geared to a different demographic. Hellboy II is a masterful fantasy that should appeal comic book fanboys, Lord of the Rings freaks, fans of director Guillermo del Toro, and anyone who appreciates sci-fi spectacle. Unless you’re 12 years old, or are a boomer trying to graft your childhood onto your innocent progeny, you might want to pass on Journey to the Center of the Earth. Sure, it’s in digital 3D, which offers an undeniable novelty, but better 3D movies will be coming along soon. As for The Wackness, which won this year’s Audience Award at Sundance, it’s a charming American indie film that offers a more modest style of summer escape. Details:

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

I came to this movie as a total skeptic. I was bored by the original Hellboy, and unlike most cinephiles, I was unmoved by Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-nominated Pan’s Labyrinth, which I found to be a nasty, heartless, gratuitously violent exercise in high-minded pretense. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad. But clearly it rubbed me the wrong way.

So I was not looking forward to Hellboy II. As I watched the film, I tried to resist for a while and found some good reasons to—del Toro’s dialogue is clunky, his plotting is schematic, and his abject devotion to monsters, who are more dimensional than his humans, is suspect. But Hellboy II is one of those rare sequels that’s far better than the original. It’s a visual tour de force, with an original narrative that riffs on a motherlode of mythological and surrealist fantasy while leavening it with pop wit. In the succession of brilliant directors who invent fantasy creatures, del Toro now seems poised to inherit the mantle of creature fetishism pioneered by David Cronenberg, Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.

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