Somewhat of a mixed bag

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2005)

What do you get if you mix a 7-foot red demon with a temper, a fish-person, a girl who can set herself on fire, a reincarnated Rasputin, a knife-wielding gas-mask-wearing Nazi and a lot of other nonsense together? The answer is "Hellboy", a super-hero movie that tries to set itself apart from the crowd by taking a far more over-the-top approach than most contemporary super hero movies. In spite of the rather silly premise, it actually works. Well, almost.
"Hellboy" starts out very strong, with some great action sequences, an interesting background story, and a good atmosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn't manage to keep up this level of quality towards the end.
After the novelty wears off, I quickly found myself becoming a bit bored, due to a number of reasons. First of all, the story really isn't up to much: it's the usually tale of the bad guys trying to bring about the end of the world, and it isn't worked out very well.
The characters, with the exception of Hellboy himself, aren't that interesting either. The bad guys are fairly generic and not really frightening, and, despite some efforts to flesh them out, I didn't really care about the good guys either (contrary to, e.g. "X-Men", or "Spiderman"). The fact that Hellboy is just about completely invulnerable no matter what happens also doesn't help, as it kills much of the suspense.
The action sequences in the start of the movie are very over-the-top, which makes them very enjoyable. Gradually, though, the movie takes on a somewhat more serious tone, which IMHO didn't work out very well. And although there are some genuinely funny parts in the movie, I found most of the one-liners and jokes not nearly as funny as they were probably intended.
The special effects were a mixed bag as well: the CGI looks fairly good, but the movie also seems to use a lot of conventional effects (make-up and costumes) and they often look fairly fake.
In the end, I have to say that "Hellboy" is somewhat of a mixed bag. It starts out great, but the thin story and the poorly worked out characters, it failed to keep me really interested.
*** out of *****