In a few words, it was visually amazing but a little overly syrupy.

Movie Picture from RottenTomatoes.com...Thanks!

The Jim and I are recent converts to the film character Hellboy.  We only saw HellBoy 1 about a month or so ago and really liked it.  The concept was funny/interesting, the makeup and visual effects fun, and the characters somewhat were endearing.  The second installment actually takes that endearing characteristic and mixes it with saccharin making you leave with what I felt was the beginning of diabetes.  Seriously.  A darker concept that has so much potential to me, lost a couple of points due to some overly drawn out sappy scenes of “falling in/being in love”.  I’m not going to ruin it here but let me just say, you’ll be so sick of Barry Manilow by the end of the movie.  Seriously.

The good points were that Ron Perlman still does a bang-up job as the main character, such a good departure from his “Beast” days.  I like Selma Blair as Liz.  I miss David Hyde Pierce’s voice-over work for Abe Sapien.  The visuals, however were cranked up a notch.  Del Toro’s (not the cutie Benicio), directorial budget must have seriously gone up thanks in part to the critical acclaim of Pan’s Labyrinth and there was so much CGI (done well, I might add), that the art direction and animation budget might make someone think that we’re not really in a recession these days. Oh and this movie’s spin on the Tooth Fairy concept is…um…wow.

Our feelings are, that if you like the HellBoy world…you might like it, but you’ll probably be annoyed slightly.  If you have no idea who HellBoy is…you might like it a bit more but you might be lost in the shuffle at times.  Either way, it’s a decent summer movie and worth a matinee price to be entertained by the Big Red boy and his band of BPRD folks.