I thought you guys liked Hellboy 2?

The pitch for Pacific Rim appears to be "Transformers, but without the worst parts." So Hellboy 2 is "Van Helsing, but without the worst parts."

It has nice parts, but the components of the whole don't mesh so well for me. It's like saying someone has a nice mouth, and a nice nose, but overall their face is a mess.

I don't know, I just fundamentally don't see what people can strongly dislike about it. I don't even think its a case of visuals trumping story, I think it's a good story. A movie about how we've fucked over the fantasy world and it wants to get revenge, a pretty sympathetic villain, a fun/imaginative team of fantasy main characters, there's lots of good character beats throughout. Off the top of my head there's one major plot-hole, and the humans kinda turn against Hellboy on a dime, so ya its not perfect narratively, but its solid, and no more flawed than tons of movies DIF loves like Inception or Constantine. And that pretty good narrative is paired with outstanding visuals/effects and great action sequences.

Maybe I just need to rewatch it again, but I always remembered it as kinda being widely liked by fans/critics.

But ya, sorry for the digression, didn't mean to sidetrack.

Great having you guys back, feels like this was something of a stress reliever, everyone's in a palpably great mood!

Well, I'll echo most of the sentiments here, the movie's not very good, and I personally think the conceit of it is quite dumb. But I actually think you could make it work. I believe you guys hit upon the main problem right out of the gate, tone is THE issue. Having all these monsters bumping shoulders is ridiculous by deafult, going from the high concept this should have been a flat out campfest, the more contrived the plot the better. I think the James Bond shtick is great and I think Wenham, Roxburgh and the redhead are in the right movie. If everybody else had followed suit this could have been a lot of fun. I mean, the movie is half of a full on crazy C-movie already, but with ALL the money. How glorious wouldn't it be if it had gone for ALL C-movie too?

A Van Helsing series of movies where he takes on a different monster in each installment would be great though. I'm all on board for that.

Speaking of monster hunters, has anyone seen the Solomon Kane movie? It's good, the climax is wanting, but the movie is good up until that point. It's even got the british Hugh Jackman in the lead, in addition to appearances by Max Von Sydow and the late Pete Postlethwaite.

Now, Del Toro. Of the four movies I've seen, the two Hellboys, Pan and Mimic, I'm not particularly enamoured. I put him in the same category as Gilliam and Burton, it's always interesting to see what they're up to but they never quite seem to nail it. Then again, I hear Devil's Backbone is his best. As for Hellboy 2, it felt to me like a parade of pretty stages, the first movie was better, though not great. Hellboy himself is a big problem, he's not a good character, the guy is invincible, and that's just not interesting.

Catching up is bitch.