More romance than anything else (very mild spoilers)

Rating: 5/10 (15 April 2004)

There are some small spoilers in here, but you arent gonna miss anything because of them
Well, I just walked out of one of my most anticipated movies of the year, but i did my best to keep my expectations down. All of the recent comic book movies have done an excellent job of tying in the romance/emotional struggle part without sufficing any action or thrills. This movie fails at that.
This movie was honestly a strange romance that was not very focused. For those like myself who arent familiar with the comic, hellboy is released from hell in a bizarre nazi ritual believed by them to release these demon gods who will control the earth. Well, they all get massacred and 60 years later, three of them reunite to raise hell (i had to). Enter hellboy, fishman, carrie, and alfred (the names were changed to protect the comic characters actually interesting identities.)
Much of hellboy's dialogue is muffled by his constant cigar smoking, and the rest of the plot was somewhat muddled as well, never giving you a clear picture of these people that were going to destroy the world (except for sword guy, who was actually pretty lame). The climax battle is brief and uninteresting, and the action scenes are broken up by the developing relationship between pyro chick and hellboy. One final comment, i am sure this was out of the comic book, but tentacled beasts really are not very intimidating. Oh yeah, one more thing, the cgi was pretty bad (especially the flames) and the main bad guy reminds me of the characters in the movie "the guyver" (which is great).
Bottom Line: I guess if you are a fan of the comic book, this would probably be decent, but as for action fans, this is a skip-er