I knew it was too good to be true. You can’t have a slew of decent comic book films come out before some movie has to come along and mess it up for everyone. Thank God The Dark Knight comes out next week to soothe my pain.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the sequel to 2004’s Hellboy, which centers on a demon child who grew up in the care of a U.S. secret organization known as the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, or just BPRD. Unlike the demons he hunts down and kills, Agent Hellboy is a clothes-wearing, cigar-chomping, magnum-wielding, one-liner spouting, red-blooded American with a penchant for causing explosions and defying authority figures.

On that premise alone, even I wonder if maybe I just called this one wrong, as it sounds like the recipe for a rip-snorting good time, a two hours well spent immersed in a tub of blood and cordite.

But then again everything sounds great on paper, especially considering that Hellboy’s origins lie in the color panel pages of Dark Horse comics. The comic Hellboy was a silent giant, a throwback to the early Wolverine years where tough guys didn’t open their mouths for anything but booze and bad jokes.

With series creator Mike Mignola and Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro at the helm, what could possibly have gone wrong?

Hellboy II concerns a demon prince who desires to rid the world of humans, who long broke their centuries-old contract with the demon realm when they began to encroach upon the forests and lands of the earth with no regard for the consequences. To this end, he schemes to summon the Golden Army, a mechanized battalion of indestructible soldiers that were responsible for nearly wiping out the human race during the last great war.

Let me get something out of the way first. Del Toro’s knack for visual artistry is nearly without peer in today’s film industry. When it comes to blending unique creature designs with high-quality special effects, nobody but George Lucas does it quite like him. I haven’t seen work so well-focused on character puppetry and movement since the heyday of Jim Henson studios.

Once you get past all the pretty window dressing, however, you’re left with a very shallow-action blockbuster. The characters couldn’t be more two-dimensional if they were back on the pages of a comic book. The jokes try to come off as snarky and instead come out as nothing, and you’re likely to not even realize how funny the script is trying to be and how miserably it’s failing at it. The two romances they try to carry through the movie can’t seem to be bothered with a lot of “character development” or simple freaking “intimacy.” It’s just assumed that, if a man and a woman are in the same room, they’re gonna be hot for each other. The BPRD itself is like the Men In Black in the same way that Maxwell Smart is like James Bond. The bumbling organization can’t seem to spew out enough useless agents who are constantly the victims of either wholesale slaughter or standing around and doing nothing.

There are several moments of pure magic in this film, the kind that you found in Pan’s Labyrinth, which clearly taught del Toro some much needed directorial lessons. There’s a fairy tale opening, a sympathetic villain who is twice as interesting as the entire rest of the cast and an exquisite moment with the Angel of Death. This is what a movie is supposed to be spewing out of every orifice. Instead the genius pimples on this film refuse to pop and release their quality nectar, and Hellboy II ends up spending less time taking itself seriously and more time doing and saying absolutely nothing.

Could’ve been something.

Wasn’t.