Faster than a bad Daredevil special effect, more powerful than Spider-Man, able to leap over puny X-Men in a single bound, it's Hellboy!

Rating: 9/10 (11 August 2004)

Sometime during World War Two, an agency is formed in the US to combat Hitler's occult obsessions within the Nazi organization. This leads a young misfit expert in the occult, Dr. Broom/Bruttenholm, to an accidentally brought over devil child who becomes known as Hellboy. Decades later, Hellboy has grown up into a big, sardonic bad ass (played by Ron Perlman) who works for the government battling other evil monsters with a little help from his surrogate human dad Dr. Broom (played as an old man by John Hurt), his aquatic pal Abe Sapien, and his somewhat Gothic, fire starting lady friend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair). But now dark forces are cranking out a plot that will test Hellboy, his friends, and his new partner, a young, effeminate FBI rookie by name of John Myers (Rupert Evans).
I'm not incredibly familiar with the original comic book on which this is based, but I am aware that a number of liberties were taken during the production phase to get this thing made. Well, I found I liked the film even though Nazis aren't all that much fun in terms of villains anymore. There's an unexplainable warmth to this film and a sense of humor that makes it a lot more endearing than those self-righteous X-Men films. The film is helped greatly by the former man-lion of TV's "Beauty & The Beast", Ron Perlman in the title role, and I can honestly say I'll take Selma Blair over Kirsten Dunst, Jennifer Garner and Natalie Portman ANY DAY. The film is bogged down somewhat by the unnecessary addition of the young, effeminate FBI character, John Myers played by Rupert Evans, who was thrown in primarily to give all the little girls who weren't turned on by Hellboy's virility someone to drool over.