Movie Review:

Hellboy

   Movies don't come much more aggressively mediocre than Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy, a limp bit of quasi-action fare that may be one of the least memorable films ever to hit its genre.  While there's not much that can be said to directly malign it, there's really nothing to praise either, leaving a film that just sort of sits there.

    The general idea is that Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a demon who was summoned during World War II by Nazis, but saved by an American battalion accompanied by Professor Broom (John Hurt).  In the present day, Hellboy is the cornerstone of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, a hush-hush wing of the FBI.

    Anyway.  We're introduced to John Myers (Rupert Evans), who apparently has been chosen as Hellboy's new... minder?  Who knows.  It's never really explained, but then again, not much is.  Approximately 30 seconds after Myers meets Hellboy, we're off to fight some supernatural bad guys.

    This single plot strand takes up pretty much the rest of the movie.  Why is Myers there?  Why, to complete the single most poorly-developed love triangle in cinematic history, with Hellboy and pyrokinetic Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) as the other two ends.  Apart from that, he doesn't really do much.

    Then again, neither does anyone.  The movie's called Hellboy for a reason, people - we're here to watch Ron Perlman kick butt and make wisecracks.  He certainly performs both of those tasks, though the latter is more satisfactory; the former is merely an excuse to flaunt some mediocre CGI.

    Finally, we come to the end, which is one of the blandest, most easily resolved endings in film history, and which provides some more iffy CGI.  It's certainly not aggressively bad, but, much like the rest of the film, it just flops onto the screen and lies there like some sort of dead animal.

    Hellboy will never make you want to tear your eyes out because you're watching something so terrible you no longer want to see - but that's honestly about the nicest thing that can be said for it.  (That, and Ron Perlman is pretty good in the role, at least.)  Much like last summer's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hellboy is supremely uninteresting for a supposed action film, and it doesn't even have the benefit of the few modest twists that LXG had going for it.

    The most useful thing about Hellboy is its forgettability - even though it isn't very good, it won't be enough to keep anyone in the cast from working again.  C-

Hellboy is a Columbia Pictures release.  Rated for sci-fi action violence and frightening images.