Sometimes even critics have to hold up their hands, fall on their knees and bow down in awe before the Hollywood dream machine. Hellboy II: The Golden Army has the technical brilliance of a Renaissance masterpiece and a brain the size of a pea. A spectacular panoply of Tolkien monsters and ancient creeps do battle with a man dressed as a fish, a pregnant human torch and Ron Perlman as the title hero.

Hellboy may have a pair of horns, a tail sticking through his leather trousers and a giant stone fist instead of a right hand. But Red (as he’s called by his friends, because of the colour of his neck, presumably) is as supernatural as Elvis Presley. Dishwashing is for sissies, beer is good and Charlton Heston is the best thing that ever happened to the National Rifle Association. This doesn’t go down too well with his inflammable and hormonal girlfriend (Selma Blair).

But Hellboy wasn’t invented by Mike Mignola in 1994 to share the domestic chores. He is employed by the American Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence – think Men in Black – to smoke Cuban cigars and bash the living daylights out of otherworldly beasts lurking under the streets of Manhattan. Luke Goss is the Vladimir Putin of this Underworld, and the first major eco-villain since Swampy: an embittered 968-year-old elf who has watched in cold fury as concrete has been poured over his forests. His revenge hinges on a legendary army of 16ft warriors hidden for centuries in the bowels of County Antrim.

The Spanish maestro Guillermo del Toro taps the European gene pool of myths that made Pan’s Labyrinth such an essential watch. His colourful, fabulous creatures – a swarm of flesh-eating tooth fairies, an army of wooden puppets and a sepulchral Angel of Death – have an eerie beauty. But Hellboy is the purest of fairground rides. The film has none of the uncensored emotional shocks of The Dark Knight. Ron Perlman’s bulletproof hero might fret about being an unloveable freak on the wrong side of the fence, but he’s no Heath Ledger. The miracles here are perfectly supernatural.

12A, 119 minutes

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