Poorly directed, insults viewer's intelligence

Rating: 4/10 (4 April 2004)

This is an extremely promising concept, badly executed. The first third of the movie forces too many unexplained facts on us - the only character that's given any background is Hellboy (coincidentally - he's the only major character that "works"). We have no clue as to the motivation of any of the other people, which makes it difficult to accept or understand their behavior later. And why the heck was the head of the military squad in the opening sequence being briefed during their last few steps through the rain on the way to their objective? I mean, it's a comic book movie, and we expect to suspend a dump truck-full of disbelief, but this is just flat-out stupid. Unfortunately, this sort of stupidity permeates the rest of the picture.
The middle third of the picture flows better - Hellboy is facing some monsters in various locations and continues to establish his character. The rest of the characters plod along through their actions with no obvious motivation, etc. The action sequences are garden-variety. Hellboy's one super-attribute, his "fist of doom", is underutilized (IMHO), but that's a minor quibble. A not-so-minor gripe is that during one sequence one of the monsters - which at that point had been resolutely quadrupedal (walking on four legs) - walks on his find legs for no reason whatsoever. This caused me a horrible flashback to cheezy 70's movies with people walking around in rubber suits. It looked completely ridiculous. There is also some glaring inconsistency in the amount of "damage" suffered by Hellboy in various circumstances - at one point a moderate cut on his arm causes him to lose enough blood to cause him to eventually collapse, however his being impaled with dozens of pieces of glass later is shrugged off as inconsequential. He gets up slowly after being thrown against the wall, yet gets up easily later on after directly absorbing the blast of half a dozen grenades. At one point he is engulfed in a room full of fire (to which he is supposed to be impervious) and it's the only thing in the film that knocks him unconscious. As I mentioned earlier, we expect to suspend a lot of disbelief, but the director makes it extremely difficult.
Despite the glimmer of promise shown in the second act, the final third of the movie drags you back into the intellectual gutter. We have the caricatured head of the FBI leading this mission - how the hell did this guy lead the FBI? This moron couldn't lead cub scouts on a day hike. The pronunciation of Russian words is so bad that my girlfriend (who speaks Russian as her first language) couldn't understand their words without the subtitles. I don't want to spoil the climactic (or anticlimactic, as it was for me) confrontation, but it frankly made no sense whatsoever. The evil Rasputin is given so many powers ?(for no obvious reason) it reminds me of playing superheros as a small child where you had that one friend that kept making up new "powers" whenever it was convenient (or when he/she was in "trouble") that you wanted to pummel them into the dirt. And despite that Hellboy deals with him so easily at the end that it's almost a joke.
I can see that a lot of people liked this movie so maybe I was in a harsh mood or something when I saw it (I wanted to like it), but I just couldn't get over the inconsistencies, the lazy scriptwriting, and the "beat you over the head with some information, then don't explain everything else" direction. Aside from Ron Perlman, the acting was mediocre at best (of course, it's hard to act a role that's more or less undefined). My suggestion - don't waste your time or money on this one.
4/10