‘Hellboy’ is a gob-smackingly brilliant superhero movie right from the first scene till the very end. I loved it, and it will down in history as a ‘how-to-do-it’ guide for movie-makers trying to break through in a very capitalistic industry that seems to have mostly forgotten why people loved films to begin with. Do yourself the biggest favour of your life:

Read the rest of this review.

Because none of what I’ve said so far has been remotely true, indeed it’s all been a big fat lie. ‘Hellboy’ is as far from the first paragraph as the North Pole is from being inhabited by penguins who just happen to enjoy dressing up in gorilla suits.

In even blunter terms: ‘Hellboy’. Is. A. Shitty. Film.

(This is a slightly spoilerish review, so if you’re planning on watching this movie, I’d recommend you through that foolish notion out the proverbial window and let me tell you why ‘Hellboy’ isn’t worth your time. Trust me, it’s in your own best interest)

Describing the plot of this movie is easy since it’s so generic that a three-year old could’ve predicted the entire story after watching the first five minutes: Nazi Germany is losing and they need some new allies. But these puny humans have proved so Got Verdamt ineffectual that a real live demon should work out a lot better. Sadly though, the only place they can open the portal to the underworld is somewhere in Great Britain, and they are naturally discovered and stopped, but not before a red little thing has managed to claw its way through to our world.

Enter Hellboy , a freakishly strong devil-shaped demon who fights the good fight in the employ of the US government. His main task is to stop other supernatural things from messing up our daily lives, though he also enjoys acting like an emo teenager and eating fiendishly huge amounts of fast-food, all of which everyone finds hugely entertaining. His sidekick is Abe Sapien (or ‘The Fish Guy’ as I aptly nicknamed him with my awesome imagination), and he’s also got a psychotically and.. ahem, pyrotechnically troubled love interest, whom I thought of as ‘Crazy Fire Girl’ (yes, even I am astounded at myself at this point).

But Nazi Germany isn’t dead!

(…)

Well okay, Nazi Germany is dead, but that doesn’t mean it can’t spring a nasty, let’s-end-the-world plot from beyond the grave!

(…)

Or rather, their formerly employd evil witch doctor/dark lord wizard type can do it with the help of a blonde-haired Nazi-groupie and a seemingly unstoppable kung-fu fighting mummy-assassin!

But enough about all that! Surely there are some good things to say about ‘Hellboy’?

Well, if you insist… I did actually enjoy one thing about all this, and that was the way this film was shot. The composition was lovely, and made the most out of their scarce resources. Hell, Hellboy himself, who does indeed look terribly stupid in his big, red costume, was shot in a manner that nearly didn’t make him look ridiculous. Frankly, I was more than shocked how much ‘Hellboy’ sucked compared to “Pan’s Labyrinth”, which I personally think is one of the best films made on this side of the noughties. I can spot some similarities in the between the two, but those are mainly technical, and not story-telling wise.

The acting is generally tiresomely mediocre and more often than not it threatens to become downright bad, though I’ll grant that the poorly written dialogue should get an equal measure of the blame as the poor people who tried to make the best out of it. Even the designed ‘cool-guy’ lines that Hellboy sputtered out at predictable intervals weren’t especially cool, and after ‘the first act’ of the movie was done, I kind of zoned out the build-up to the climax while I imagined what this film would be like if Joss Whedon’s “Spike” had gotten the lead in such a film. That’d easily be much more watchable than this piece of crap.

So, to sum up: ‘Hellboy’ has only a single redeeming factor, and that’s the fact that this film doesn’t look like a stinking turd, even though it clearly is… However, I’m thoroughly intrigued to see whether ‘Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” is as much of an improvement as I think (or hope) it’s going to be.

At least it won’t be worse than this.

2.5/10