IN ORDER to enjoy Hellboy II: The Golden Army, you don't need to read the comics or even see 2004's Hellboy because the sequel swiftly sketches all your basic nutritional information. Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is 6ft 5in, has skin like a glazed ham, likes kittens, sweeties and cigars, and keeps his horns filed down so as not to alarm the public. He's also a demon from Hades, adopted and raised by John Hurt, and now works for the US government as a paranormal investigator alongside other superhuman mutations including Liz (Selma Blair), his literally fiery girlfriend/human torch, and a half man/half fish psychic called Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), an urbane sidekick in the mould of C-3PO.

Their job is to keep the occult legions (trolls, goblins, elves, oh my!) from invading the human world, even though humans aren't always very grateful about the protection, so to keep Hellboy from raising his profile too often, the bureau's oleaginous boss Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) brings in a new commander: Johann Krauss (the voice of Seth MacFarlane), an ectoplasmic puff of Teutonic smoke encased in a Jules Verne-style diver's suit.

Director Guillermo del Toro always gives you something to look at in his films. If you've seen Pan's Labyrinth, you'll recognise a parade of just about every creature he designed for his Oscar-winning feature, as well as some new ones he's possibly testing for his two-picture adaptation of The Hobbit. It's an all-you-can-gawk buffet of winged, tentacled beasts, a monster with a cathedral growing out of its head, tiny tooth fairies that look delicate but actually feed on human bones and the film's action centrepiece, a 70-foot forest demon that looks like a greener, meaner cousin of The Lord Of The Rings' Treebeard.

"I'm not a baby, I'm a tumour," warns something being cosseted in a mother's arms. There's so much to look at in Hellboy II – so many things with eyes in all the wrong places – that the picture runs the risk of being excessive. But in the end this just about works, as if Hieronymus Bosch had a nightmare about George Lucas.

One of del Toro's oddest idiosyncrasies is his enthusiasm for the actor who plays Prince Nuada, Hellboy's main villain here, and performed much the same function in Del Toro's Blade II. He is an excellent-looking bad guy, executing spin-kicks and handling a magical spear-dagger like a Hong Kong action star. But he is still Luke Goss, formerly of the Aryan boyband Bros. It's like discovering Westlife's Brian McFadden trying to blow up Gotham City in the new Batman.

But like McFadden, Prince Nuada has a Delta Goodrem, a serenely vampish twin, inextricably connected by supernatural bonds. Since it's not clear which side Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) is on, you'll have to guess if she supports her brother's mission of awakening a dormant army of indestructible golden soldiers.

I don't. After last week's The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor, I'm not keen on Hellboy standing up to an army of anything. Big CGI showdowns have become a staple of fantasy movies, and pace The Lord Of The Rings there's a mistaken belief that bigger and longer is better, when these clashes are less emotionally charged than a video game. There's a fight every 10 minutes in Hellboy II, and among the sturm and drang, you may reflect that if Hellboy and Liz could stop arguing about his pet cats overrunning their flat, they might stop the power-hungry Prince Nuada a bit quicker.

Still, Hellboy is enjoyable because, unlike the rest of the heroes in this long summer of the superpowered, he's not dragged down by character neuroses. It's just unfortunate that he sometimes struggles to be seen among the biomorphic props of del Toro's monster ball. After the lengthy introspective chat of Batman in The Dark Knight, the winking wit of a cigar-chomping Perlman is something to cheer for, as is the movie's broader ambition of eschewing the usual brooding clichés, right down to the soundtrack. Other superheroes may favour piledriving metal anthems, but del Toro features Vivaldi and Barry Manilow. And I never thought a Barry Manilow song could be used for anything but evil.

On general release from Friday