I don't even want to think about how bad Hellboy III will be

Rating: 3/10 (20 August 2010)

This may be one of the worst sequels in the history of cinema where the writer and director of the first film is still involved in the production. Hellboy II has far more monsters and special effects than its predecessor, but it has less of everything that really matters. Less intelligence. Less style. Less drama. Less charm. Less heart. This amazingly ill conceived movie is even in a different genre than the original Hellboy. Imagine The Empire Strikes Back as a musical or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a comedy.
It is impossible for me to exaggerate how flawed and poorly executed this film is. In the first three minutes of the movie, it tells you how the story is going to end. Within the first 15 minutes, it tells you exactly how the bad guy is going to be defeated. The script takes a character from the first film and completely craps all over him, so it can replace him with a special effect that has such a pathetically stereotypical personality, it's something Mel Brooks would have come up with after he had three separate lobotomies. One of the basic concepts of the first movie is literally thrown out the window before the sequel is half over and then that change is forgotten about. The physical nature of one character is altered without any explanation. Dramatic plot threads are picked up and dropped like a thumbless juggler. And then there's the drunken monster karaoke, which believe me, is not as cool as it sounds.
The plot (which again, is essentially spelled out for you in the first three minutes of the film) concerns the old gang from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense squaring off against an elf prince who wants to use an ancient weapon to destroy humanity. Hellboy (Ron Perlman), the demon who just wants to be accepted, acts more like Buddy Hackett than a super-hero. His pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair) is an afterthought caught in a storyline out of a exceptionally dumb soap opera. The aquatic Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) spends the entire movie behaving like Niles Crane around Daphne, even though he's no longer voiced by David Hyde Pierce. The elf prince (Luke Goss) acts like he wants to be a contestant on "So You Think You Can Dance". He's got a sister (Anna Walton) who sets back the cause of elven feminism by about a thousand years.
The special effects and the hordes of creatures that populate this movie are nice to look at, but that's all. It's as if writer/director Guillermo Del Toro thought that as long as he made it visually interesting, no one would care that every other aspect of the film sucked ass. Sadly, he's right for some people.
Hellboy II is so different in so many ways from Hellboy that if you hated the first film, you might actually like this one. That is, if you also have no taste, read at a kindergarten level and are hopped up on goofballs. Let me be blunt. This movie makes Men In Black II look like The Godfather, Part II. Avoid this thing like a hooker with sores on her upper lip.