I thought the first Hellboy was pretty good, in spite of the whole Benico Del Toro visual aesthetic. I don't know anything about the character aside from what I vaguely remember from those movies, which I saw in theaters, and not since.

But I'm pretty sure this character is different. It's not all that good. The story is that Hellboy, who was "born" when a group of desperate Nazis conspired with Rasputin, who was an actual wizard, to summon a demon to save their cause, but the era's equivalent of the BPRD led by a guy named Broom, attacked to shut down their ritual. The only creature that was summoned was a little baby demon, which they spared and took in to raise as a member of the government paranormal-hunting crew. So now he's this giant red guy with superhuman abilities, a large stone(? )fist and horns he has file down to stumps like humans have to shave. This stuff was from the older movies, but is told later in this one in flashbacks.

There is a whole other backstory to flash back to. In Arthurian times, there was a witch or something like that came Nimwe, the Blood Queen, played by Milla Jovovich, who was defeated by Arthur & Merlin, with the help of traitor on Nimwe's team. They chopped her up and buried the still-moving pieces in different parts of England. Nimwe was the leader of paranormal creatures and monsters and whatnot, and with her downfall, they vanished into hiding, sort of. Now, someone's apparently trying to bring Nimwe back, so Hellboy and Broom, who raised him and whom he addresses as his father, go to England, where they meet Daniel Dae Kim's character, who works for MI-11, and is distrustful of Hellboy, because he thinks all monsters are evil. See, he's got these facial scars from when he and his team hunted a were-jaguar in Central America, and he was the only survivor. Anyway, Hellboy goes to visit a secret society, whose leadership was involved with his origin and for some reason, they and Broom don't age, much, which is explains how all these people who were adults in 1945 are still active. Anyway these guys hunt giants, and there are three of them running around and this is connected to the plot to bring back Nimwe, so Hellboy rides out to hunt giants. When it goes badly, he is helped out by a British chick, who has psychic abilities.

The British chick is Alice and when she recites a part of "The Jabberwock" to Hellboy, he remembers her from when she was a kid. Alice can hear dead people, and in some cases, channel them into really bad CGI ghosts who can talk to Hellboy. Also, he starts getting visions of Nimwe, who is trying to persuade him to join her team. So they go to the English version of the BPRD, to work with Broom, and they learn, while we get to watch, that some pig-monster is gathering the pieces of Nimwe, and only needs like one more. So we get another flashback origin story, to explain how the pig monster, Alice & Hellboy are connected. And the pig-monster's motivation for seeking to bring back Nimwe. And Hellboy starts getting snitty about Professor Broom raising him instead of killing him, and how he was raised to be a monster-killer instead of a normal childhood and maybe he's somewhat sympathetic to Nimwe because he's a monster himself, and she's like the leader of all monsters and kind of like their Magneto.

The major problem here is the conflicts. The emotional conflict with regard to Hellboy & his "father" is that it seems to come out of nowhere to serve the plot. His reactions and feelings seem adolescent. Maybe "Hellboy" is supposed to be literal, and he's supposed to be a slow-aging teenager, who's still working this stuff out, rather than a guy who's over 70 years old, played by a middle aged actor, who usually plays authority figures (or creeps). So his complaints come across as immature whining. There is no real substance to any idea that the monsters are the good side, since the opening narration establishes that Arthur and Merlin went after Nimwe because she was causing a plague, and that's what she is set to do when she comes back. She was not living in peace and persecuted for her differences or some similar nonsense, so it is hard to take seriously Hellboy's interest in switching teams.

The plot also tries to do way too much. There are, as mentioned, three different origin flashback stories. One for Nimwe, one for Hellboy and one for Alice & the pig monster. There is a side quest thing where Hellboy confronts a version of Baba Yaga, with stuff mentioned about a backstory between them. In the older "Hellboy" the Nazis from his origin story came back, and in this one, the credits give some of the same names, like Von Krupt and Ilsa. In Alice's flashback, her parents live in what appears to be the same apartment when she was a newborn that she lives in now as an adult. And yet, Hellboy has never been to the English BPRD headquarters before the present-day events of this film. So why was he investigating the paranormal things going on with Baby Alice in England? Not to mention, Alice is a baby. She is not old enough to interact with and befriend Hellboy, much less to the degree that the Jabberwock poem would have such meaning. Yes, he is shown reading Carroll's book in her family apartment with her parents, but it's a pretty famous poem. Reciting a couple of stanzas does not prove you are the now-grown child of the people who loaned you the book. There there is the secret society tied to Hellboy's origin and connected to Broom, which is not given much depth. There is a superhero with a logo present helping Broom & co attack the Nazi's in Hellboy's origin flashback.

Clearly, this movie's major purpose in being made is to set up a franchise. There is a sequel hook in the coda which teases one of the main characters from the older films. They are keeping the secret society and the Nazis and more Alice history in their pocket for future Hellboy films. But along the way, the current story suffers. There are hints that lots of good guys want to take Hellboy out because of the coming of Nimwe and bad guys who are happier to see him involved than you think, all of which seems like they are trying to set up the twist that his role is not to stop Nimwe but join her, but that idea never really develops, along with the suggestions that Nimwe isn't really the bad guy but was done wrong by Arthur and Merlin, or that Hellboy is caught between two equally viable choices, loyalty to his human upbringing or to the other monsters, because there is nothing established in the story why, beyond the superficial, he'd ever want to join the monsters, or that they are a morally acceptable alternative.

Beyond all the overstuffed plot set-up, Hellboy's personal conflict is also established in a sloppy manner, and he isn't developed enough as a character, likewise with Alice, and you find out way too late that Kim's agent character is important and maybe he should also have been developed. The multiplicity of other elements inserted into this film means none of them really have time for you to get attached to them, like the weird Baba Yaga sequence that feels like Hellboy stepped into another movie to get some information, but has no impact on anything afterwards. There is a part where Hellboy is offered a chance to gain an advantage over Nimwe, and it is set up like there is a huge danger if he messes it up, but that bit is over and again, it has no real impact on the final outcome, which is "fight bad guy and lose, until the plot decides it's time for you to win, and now your blows actually have and effect and the bad guy can no longer pummel you as easily."

The action sequences are not even worth watching, and since Hellboy's powers and nature are left up in the air, you never really feel a threat in the story, not that he will go to the Dark Side and not that he's ever in any danger, and the movie doesn't give many reasons to care about his sidekicks taking a shot meant for him.

All in all, this feels like a kind of pointless movie, cranked out because comic book movies are big right now.