The summer movie season arrives early with big-screen adaptation Hellboy, a marginally interesting though beautifully styled adventure, written and directed by master scenarist Guillermo Del Toro and based on the cult comic book by Mike Mignola.

The film begins during World War II, where standard-issue Hollywood Nazis are trotted out with a familiar world domination scheme, this time with a twist. They are in supernatural cahoots with a mad monk, Rasputin (Karen Roden). In a fantastically staged opening sequence, reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark’s climax, a portal into another dimension is opened and Hellboy, a demonic creature with red skin, Satan’s tail and goat-like horns, is born. The Nazi plan is that Hellboy will bring Earth to apocalypse, but allied forces intervene, of course, and thwart the plan, taking possession of Hellboy and raising him in one of those great movie locales, the top-secret U.S. Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

Taken under the wing of Dr. Broom (John Hurt), adult Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is locked away in secret and used as a weapon for good—in this case, monster battling—by the U.S. government. He spends his days lounging around, working out, raising litters of cats and pining after lost love Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a former bureau resident and "firestarter," capable of using emotion to create fire (X-Men, anyone?).

Enter John Myers, a painfully generic young FBI fop put in charge of Hellboy. They immediately clash and the divide deepens when it appears a fledgling romance is in the cards between Myers and Liz (one wishes for them to kiss and incinerate each other, since they display no chemistry on screen let alone energy). Of course, it doesn’t take long for the Nazi villains of decades past to inexplicably re-emerge and hunt down Hellboy to complete their original plan, complete with an undead, unstoppable (are there any other kind?) slimy set of creatures in tow.

There is nothing original in this story, from the villains to the melancholy strong man, to the Beauty and the Beast and X-Men underpinnings and overtones. The comic, bittersweet and action tones almost coalesce, but more often than not the film feels labored, long and frequently…routine.

More interesting than Hellboy is a supporting character named Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), who resembles the Creature from the Black Lagoon and exists inside a massive aqua tank at the bureau. Abe is a psychic, highly intelligent hybrid of man and fish who looks intimidating but comes off like an affectionate C-3P0 sidekick (he’s voiced by Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce) next to Hellboy’s raging testosterone. Del Toro stages a terrifically suspenseful sequence involving the infiltration of the tank by enemy creatures and we’re surprised at how much we want likeable Abe to find safety.

Even more interesting than Abe is a truly menacing movie villain that Del Toro unfortunately gives short shrift onscreen. As the most deadly member of the reincarnated Third Reich clan, Kroenin is a supernatural sadist, a surgery-obsessed super villain, with truly staggering physical command in several enjoyable hand-to-knife combat scenes. Watch how carefully, precisely and deadly he moves —ballet like— how well he handles weapons and how terrifying a presence he becomes sheerly by movement, face covered. When his mask comes off his visage is truly chilling.

I didn’t like Hellboy himself much, and found the film to be a mostly cold experience, more often content to rouse me with its action bravado than warm me with its angst-ridden anti-hero. Perlman is fine in the role, and he ought to be as a veteran of TV’s Beauty and the Beast. He’s effective at creating a laid-back "superhero," desperate, as all isolated, larger than life movie heroes are, to love and be loved, assimilate and become normal. Sourpuss Blair underplays, and fails to heat up the proceedings as the requisite human (i.e., unattainable) love object. Blair, the most vacuous of movie stars, confuses the character’s unwillingness to show emotion for fear of combustion with an actress’s inability to do the same.

Faring even worse than Blair is a wan, pallid Evans as FBI agent Myers. He’s a blank slate here, and the film falls apart any time he’s front and center. Played unconvincingly, if this is the type of agent that comes out of Quantico these days—inept, physically intimidated, under confident, falling down—we’ve taken a long fall since the days Clarice Starling single-handedly caught Buffalo Bill in pitch darkness, no less.