Hellboy: Director's Cut (UMD)

Hellboy is a comic book movie. It's big, fun, and sometimes over the top, but it has depth where you might not expect to find it. As with comic books, many people won't expect much from a comic book movie, and that sort of people probably won't find much in it, either. But watch this movie hoping for bright colors, great special effects, and larger-than-life characters and you won't be disappointed. And you might just get a lot more out of it than you expected to.

If you're looking for a deeply philosophical film with Oscar-quality acting, you're probably looking in the wrong place (but if you can set aside any prejudices you might have against movies based on fantasy comics, you could very well be surprised in that regard). As for me, I liked Hellboy a great deal.

Mike Mignola's Comic

Fans of the Hellboy comics by Mike Mignola might be disappointed that the movie doesn't strictly follow the comic's storyline. But movies and comics are very different media with very different demands (though comics are the one print medium that comes closest to film). I think, though, that this movie does capture the spirit of the comic, and maybe that's what counts.

The Big Red Guy

Ron Perlman was excellently cast as the titular character. After all, who can dislike Ron Perlman in a red latex suit with horns? He's wonderfully irreverent, and just the right combination of appealing and ugly (yeah, so I have a thing for appealingly ugly guys with big guns -- my favorite Ghost in the Shell Character is Batou).

Doug Jones is marvelously other as Abe Sapien, and Selma Blair does a nice job as Liz Sherman, though I would have liked to have seen her backstory in more detail.

Extras, or the Lack Thereof

Sadly, as with most UMD movie releases, there are no extras on this disc (unless you count multiple subtitle languages). The DVD had so many extras it required a second disc -- how hard would it be to fit another disc into a UMD case?