I’m not as big a Hellboy fan as Jason and Tony are—I’ve read a few of the comics, and I saw the 2004 movie, which I enjoyed. While I did like Hellboy II: The Golden Army, I would say that on many fronts it failed to fully engage me (especially coming on the heels of the complex tapestry of The Dark Knight). But much of it does work: director Guillermo del Toro’s fantastic imagination for the creatures that inhabit this world, for example (which bears a strong resemblance to his 2006 masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth). The most successful scenes to me are not the action scenes, which still rely a little to heavily on CGI for my tastes, but the ones that focus on the mundane lives of the characters themselves: Hellboy and Abe commiserating about love over a beer and sappy love song or the great slapstick scene of Hellboy butting heads with new BPRD leader Johann Krauss. But del Toro seemed to be tugged between telling a couple different stories in the movie (Hellboy’s relationship with humans and the overt conflict with the elves), and ends up giving short shrift to both. That said, it is worth noting that Selma Blair is hot—in every sense of the word.