I finally got to see this...and I was pretty disappointed. I stayed away from just about all reviews so it wasn't like I went into this with a predisposition to dislike it, though I was troubled by the trailer...but from the start of the film, the very first bit of dialogue I think, a bad feeling emerged. I was digging the opening at first, a dark age war scene shot in black and white reminding me of the original Universal Horror movies seemed like a great opening but then Ian Mcshane's Bruttenholm starts to narrate and I was taken aback," they're called the dark ages...and with good f@#king reason." just really took me out of it. Now, I'm not opposed to cursing, I'm from Boston so dropping f-bombs in daily speech is my god-granted right, and I enjoy Quenten Tarentino's films just fine but in those flicks it comes off as natural and generally used for either comedic purposes or in expressing shock or character traits...but here it feels incredibly forced and beyond that serves no other purpose than to say, "This is an R rated film so I can say the word F@#ck if I want to." which is just juvenile.

I could have gotten past that though, and even past the episodic pacing which dropped Hellboy into fight after fight without much connective tissue...bu the creature effects were just plain bad, both Cgi and traditional effects just felt cheaply done. Despite liking Harbors personality with Hellboy none of it came through in the face; the prosthetic were so thick that it just looked like a rubber mask as nothing moved in the face when ever Hellboy talked and the same was true for the baba yaga as well. And the cgi? Well I 'll just say it was cartoony (which didn't fit the tone) and leave it at that. The worst though? The Right Hand of Doom...it visibly squished like foam in several scenes. We all know it's movie magic and isn't actually made of stone, but you have to do something the hide that fact.

There were scenes that I really loved though, Hellboy refusing Excalibur, the vision of his birth and his transformation at the end were fantastic but I think that really made it all the worse as it showed us that it could have been excellent if only someone else was at the helm.

That was meant to be Koschei the Deathless,
strangely he's from the book the preceded the stories the film was largely based on.

I think that was another of the flaws with the film; the director seemed to think that Hellboy had a much larger level of cultural awareness than the book actually has. The end credit scenes that work in Marvel movies and drive hype for further installments do so because the general public has a vague understanding and awareness of who the characters are. So if you have the Black Panther show up after the end and say something ominous people immediately start talking about wanting to see that...but a character no one is aware of shows up and does the same thing? You just aren't going to get that same reaction.