No no no, wrong wrong wrong, bad bad movie!

Rating: 3/10 (11 July 2008)

Imagine if all of Star Wars had been Jar Jar Binks. Think about the annoying kid "Short Round" from the second Indiana Jones movie. Remember for a second how cheated you felt after paying to sit through "Men in Black II," "Aliens III," and "Star Trek V". You get the idea.
This movie took a good gritty graphic novel (and pretty good first film) and screwed it up to appeal to the kiddie market. Instead of the tough but lovable demon we met in the first film, "Hellboy II" makes him more of a buffoonish cartoon character. Aside from a scene of gratuitous Tecate beer drinking (with the name on the can ALWAYS facing the camera, of course) and one "I'm gonna kick his ass" comment, I'm hard pressed to see how this received even a PG-13 rating. It's a bad sign when the high point of an action movie is (I kid you not) a Barry Manilow song. Let me repeat that: A BARRY MANILOW SONG.
Selma Blair is excellent in her return as Liz Sherman, but Ron Perlman is toned down way too much this time. Gone is the cynical, grumbling behemoth of the first movie, only to be replaced by a red version of Sully from "Monsters Inc." His love of cats, rather than being an amusing anachronism, now seems quite in character for what he has become, a p***y-whipped homebody, promising to try to clean up his act. The underlying threat is just no longer there.
The other characters fared no better. Sadly, the talented David Hyde Pearse, who in the original (unbilled) voiced Abe Sapien, has been replaced in the role by a C3P0 clone Doug Jones (who wore the blue tadpole suit in both films.) The always-tedious Jeffrey Tambor, freshly unemployed from the mercifully-canceled "Welcome to the Captain", was in WAY too many scenes playing, essentially, Jeffrey Tambor. Worst of all: Seth MacFarlane, who voices Peter Griffin on "Family Guy", turns in a ridiculously bad performance providing the voice of a faceless new German agent, Johann Krauss; honestly, the accent and inflections were so cringe-inducing, they would be questionable in a Scooby-Doo cartoon, never mind a major motion picture.
This could have been a good movie. The plot (an elf prince seeks to revive an indestructible golden army to renew an ancient war with humanity) was promising, and Luke Goss and Anna Walton (as the prince and his sister) both did good jobs with the roles (although their makeup was shamelessly copied from that of the Wraith aliens of "Stargate: Atlantis", and it would have been nice to see a few more elves other than just the two of them and their father.)
But execution is important too, and to be taken seriously, a movie needs to take itself at least somewhat seriously. This one didn't. With foolish performances, silly voices and sound effects, dumb stunt sequences (the baby-tossing scene seen in previews), and a cutesy dime-store soundtrack, "Hellboy II" never lets the audience believe that there's any real menace presented in the story.
Particularly if you liked the original graphic novel or the first "Hellboy" movie, you're going to be annoyed by this watered-down, Disney-esque sequel. Never mind the shameless foreshadowing of the plot of "Hellboy III", they never should have made "Hellboy II" if they weren't going to do a better job than this.