If you skipped the original "Hellboy" in 2004, also the work of del Toro, you won't be at much disadvantage. Just remember that a demon, raised from infancy after being conjured by and rescued from the Nazis, grows up to become a defender against the forces of darkness. Remember also that this is an adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic books, or illustrated novels if you prefer snob appeal, and judge the movie not for its story (it's no "War and Peace") but for its intricate visual details. In the general mayhem that takes up the major part of the film, you won't get much character development outside of the love between the title character and Liz (who is pregnant but keeps that detail hidden), but the picture is about good versus evil—and there's not much negotiating going on between the two forces.

Consider the Mexican director's imagination as without limit, especially since he is obviously given quite a budget for letting his creative side take off. In the story, Hellboy has allied himself with Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) who is with the secret organization based in Trenton, New Jersey known as the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. The organization is not unlike our own Homeland Security department except that it deals with supernatural enemies. What causes the latest problem with the forces of darkness? A truce between human beings and an underworld group has been broken by Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), intent on raising a Golden Army of giant warriors to lay claim to the Earth. Hellboy is determined to fight the bad guys with his fists, while the prince has the jump on him, literally, with his ability to turn eight somersaults in seven seconds and flip a sword or spear around his arm with more class and pomp than the captain of the Trenton High School cheerleaders. Princess Nuada (Anna Walton) serves as the prince's sister, a traitor to the cause as she sides with the human beings. She hides the third part of the prince's crown—which of course is recovered by his highness in time to awaken the ferocious golden army. This leads to the climactic battle in Northern Ireland, of all places: Red vs. Prince, with the army agreeing to follow the command of the winner.

Special effects are paramount, including hundred of cockroach-like creatures that devour a lot more than your Sunday picnic and are not the nice guys as represented in "Wall-E"; a gorilla with antlers, an aquatic creature with the green head and goggles, and some faceless hordes from the titled golden army. The proceedings are filmed by Guillermo Navarro, whose camera takes in some occasional wisecracking by Hellboy (nothing worth mentioning here unless you find a drunken rendition of Barry Maniolow's "Can't Smile Without You" by Hellboy and his pal Abe). If anyone doubts that movies are the visual medium par excellence, this picture will serve to convince.

The title figure's name is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Litter Earth-Class. Wall-E's job has always been to pick up litter, compact it, and place it into neat piles. But the planet Earth became so encrusted with dirt that it was no longer inhabitable. Seven hundred years from now, people have deserted their home, taking off on luxury space cruises, but accidentally forgetting to turn off one desperately lonely robot, whose only hobby while doing his job is to collect widgets—a Rubik Cube, a bulb, a spork—the last being a plastic utensil that can be used as both a fork and a spoon. His favorite item is a VHS tape of the movie "Hello Dolly," where he learns that human beings dance, hold hands, and sing.

From out of nowhere comes a potential mate named Eve, acronym for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluated. She has been sent to Earth by the captain of the luxury ship to scan the Earth and report back on its ability to sustain life. Whether there is real chemistry between Wall-E and Eve can be left to the judgments of audience members. One wonders throughout about what kind of female robot could fall for a gent covered by seven hundred years of dirt, though maybe the undesirability of filth is strictly a cultural matter invented by humans. Plants seem not to mind at all.

The "human" dimensions are more interesting, which is where the mildly left-wing aspects become prominent. Men and women floating about on the captain's ship are one hundred percent obese, since they have nothing to do but lie around drinking and eating and listening to commercials from a corporation that seems to have bought out every other store in space. Eve and Wall-E have shot themselves up into space to join the human beings, their poking about leading to an array of situations that some might find humorous, others inane.

As stated before, the animation is what this is all about, with Pixar Studios determined to show off the same pleasures found in "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life," "Cars" and others. The two lead robots could almost have come out of the silent movie tradition, since all they say are "Eva" and "Wall-E," "Wall-E" and "Eva," ad nauseum. Ben Burtt takes on the voice of Wall-E, the obvious choice since Burtt had designed the robots' sound in the "Star Wars" series. Fred Willard appears as the only recognizable human being, a talking head representing the BnL corporation, while Jeff Garlin assumes the role of the captain, eager to return home to Earth as soon as he sees evidence in a lonely little plant that our planet may sustain life. Parents, escorted by their eight-year-olds, will be disappointed by the simplicity of the story, which lacks wit and a courageous satiric bite.

The real pleasure of the day, however, is a five-minute short that precedes the main attraction. "Presto" is a comic gem about a magician whose bunny goes on strike, since the furry friend is unable to convince his human partner to hand over a carrot. "Presto" evokes the ideal combination of style and substance, a laugh-a-second piece of Pixar fantasy.

Thanks to Mike Myers's vanity project in that last citation, "Hancock" cannot be called for worst movie of the summer. However, even by action-adventure standards, namely those movies targeted to the 16-25 year-olds, Peter Berg's creation scripted by Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan, is a dud. You'd think that with a budget of $150 million, money that could go quite a way toward hiring hundreds more Wall-E's to clean up our waste, you could dream up a movie that does not assault us with CGI and stunt work involving a human being's ability to take off like a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, and who, more powerful than a locomotive, cannot make a soft landing in L.A. Every time the title character, a sometimes airborne superhero played by Will Smith, sets himself back down on terra firma, he uproots enough concrete to assure employees of companies with government road-repair contracts of steady jobs even during our current recessionary times.

Aside from a clever twist that I couldn't see coming at just about midpoint, director Berg ("The Kingdom") must have figured that the public would eat up a film with an original idea, and it is an intriguing one: that a superhero who has lived for centuries without aging—just as do Captain Marvel, Superman, Wonder Woman, maybe Spiderman—would be so sick and tired of his job that he would drink himself into a stupor, not bother shaving, and take naps not at a super-home but on a park bench. A fallen superhero, not bad. Premise notwithstanding, the hackneyed car crashes, train wrecks, building destructions, automatic artillery still dominate the picture while the human angle, which should have been exploited more and with greater subtlety, exists as a throwaway. The dreary explanation of Hancock's origin sounds like pure gobbledygook.

As for the human angle: We first meet Hancock (Will Smith) sleeping off a hangover on a park bench, called an a-hole by a kid as he will be called many times throughout the story. Having aroused the public to dislike him because everywhere the superhero goes to stop crimes, he creates wreckage, Hancock is about to get a makeover by a public relations executive, Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), whose life he had saved albeit at the cost of wrecking cars and a locomotive in the process. Embrey teaches Hancock to say "Good job" to police, a start toward gaining the public's affection, and to try to do his superwork without so much collateral damage. If Hancock is to change radically though, it will not be through another man's counsel but through the chemistry he develops with Embrey's gorgeous wife, Mary (Charlize Theron). Almost needless to say, there a kid in the picture, Aaron (Jae Head), who adores Hancock and is about the only guy who doesn't call him an a-hole. On the other hand, Eddie Marsan plays Red, a villain who winds up in jail thanks to a Hancock intervention during a crime, and who is determined to locate the hero's kryptonite and do him in.

"Hancock" tries to appeal to everyone, mixing genres so quickly that the movie cannot bear the weight of its central theme: that nobody's perfect, that we all have vulnerabilities that should be worked on while at the same time we must accept what we cannot change. Explosions give way to sermonizing, romance steps aside for tragedy. The feelgood ending is even more absurd than any mystical notions introduced in the movie about the hero's origins, while subtlety and nuance take a summer vacation.

With McAvoy in almost every scene as Wesley Gibson, a nerdy, put-upon, pushed-around accountant, "Wanted" has the feel of a Walter Mitty fantasy helmed by Kazakhstan-born Timur Bekmambetov, who is responsible for two high box-office successes in Russia, "Night Watch" and "Day Watch"—the former about a group that divided into forces of darkness and light centuries ago. The story opens without the slightest background information on a Mr. X (David Patrick O'Hara), who jumps through a window onto the roof of an adjacent building only to be cut down by strange bullets that curve around corners the way that any self-respecting pro-basketball player can score a hook shot.

We're taken into the cubicle of Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), whose face turns beet-red from a dressing down from his boss, Janice (Lorna Scott). But that's nothing compared to what follows, as Wesley, about to renew his prescription for anti- anxiety pills, winds up in the middle of a gun battle, protected by a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie), who informs him that his father had died the day before. She indicts one Cross (Thomas Kretschmann) as his father's killer, then painstakingly inducts the young man into the Fraternity under the leadership of Sloan (Morgan Freeman), an initiation that involves getting himself beaten to a pulp to toughen him up for the job of getting revenge on Cross. He learns how to shoot bullets on a curve, how to run, jump and most important to strut his stuff as a born-again superhero.

Later, in Europe (shot by Mitchell Amundsen in Prague and in that beautiful city's Barrandov Studios), a Fraternity leader (Terence Stamp) sets him up on a train where he can face off against Cross as though he were Marshall Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann's "High Noon." At this point, the Big Twist plays out as our superhero realizes that things are seldom what they seem.

Angelina Jolie takes a back-seat to the splendidly cast James McAvoy who, as an account manager in a cubicle has the cautious personality of the doctor in "The Last King of Scotland" but who emerges as a buttkicking dynamo under the tutelage of the Fraternity. Comic scenes center on Wesley's relationship with his girlfriend, a woman who is regularly cheating on him with Wesley's best friend, Barry (Chris Pratt). The pic becomes pulsating from Danny Elfman's music, gains speed with David Bremmer's editing, and scenic variety in Prague, Chicago and New York through Mitchell Amundsen's lenses. Writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas's "3:10 to Yuma" serves as background to this much faster-moving popcorn movie, but ultimately the picture's quality depends on James McAvoy's credible performance as the nerd that most of us are, all of us wishing for the superhero to come out.

"Get Smart" has a lot of action shots filmed by Dean Semler—a low-flying propeller plane threatened with breakup; a car about to collide with a train; some skydiving with and without parachutes; explosions within a bakery; car chases; people chases; gun-play; all punctuated by Trevor Rabin's pulsating music with breakneck speed encouraged by editor Richard Pearson. But comedy is scripters' Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember's primary consideration, the laughs coming out of the situations that the agents of CONTROL find themselves in, while verbal wit is virtually nonexistent. In fact there is just one quip worthy of the term in the entire one hundred ten minutes of the movie, that involving an essay on existentialism that Maxwell Smart has written on an exam that he takes for a hoped-for promotion in the agency.

Steve Carrel anchors the show as CONTROL agent Maxwell Smart, who will turn out to confirm the Peter Principle: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." An expert at analysis, he picks up chatter of enemies of the U.S., delivering valuable information to the staff of the clandestine agency. When he passes an exam that should have promoted him to agent, the bureau chief (Alan Arkin) wants to keep him doing what he has been doing, though circumstances change. He becomes a field operative, Agent 86, is teamed up with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), and is no longer responsible for preparing dull reports for Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson). The job is to uncover nefarious activities by the head of KAOS, Siegfried (Terence Stamp), suspected of considering sabotage somewhere in the U.S.

The laughs are designed around essentially a series of Saturday Night Live skits involving the relationship of Agent 86 and Agent 99, with Anne Hathaway's character resenting a man who is brand new to the job and could compromise her safety. After all, she proves herself several times during the story by being able to run with high heels, kick, punch and shoot like the best of the men. Inevitable bickering between the two will give way to sentiment, with Agent 86 finding herself sufficiently attached to her partner that she will presumably crumble if he is hurt or killed.

As in the James Bond series, gadgets are the co-stars: 86 and 99 appear competitive even in showing off what they're carrying, the paraphernalia including the shoe phone, a pocket smokescreen, a small flamethrower, a hook, a blowgun; while sports cars formerly seen in the TV series strut their stuff—the Opel GT, the Karmann Ghia, the Sunbeam Tiger. James Caan turns up as our country's chief executive, a man who is not identified but who cannot pronounce "nuclear" and who falls asleep during a concert of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Not surprisingly, Steve Carrel is the man to watch, his Agent 99 being out of his depth in the field, but unlike The Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau sensitive enough to be taken aback by criticism. Bond wannabes have included Mike Myers's Austin Powers, Dean Dujardin's Oss 117, and in real life quite a few people in Britain who want to join M16 thinking that they will really be license to kill. There is only one James Bond: his comic imitators on the screen are pale by comparison.

Mike Myers got the idea for the movie via his spiritual quest taken after the loss of his father. He made the rounds of gurus and ashrams, as though nothing in Western psychology and philosophy could match the wisdom of the East, ultimately deciding that the way to emerge from grief is through comedy. Too bad he did not inject much of that into his latest movie.

Flashing back to his days in guru school headed by the cross-eyed Guru Tugginmypuddha (Ben Kingsley—featured in "Gandhi" and "Schindler's List" but on a roll with roles that are far beneath him), we see the man who becomes Guru Pitka (Mike Myers) ascends to second place among American gurus, bested by Deepak Chopra. Pitka knows that to get on the Oprah show, his crowning ambition, he must save the marriage of Toronto Maple Leaf's hockey star, Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco), who has been letting the team and its owner, Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), down because his wife Prudence Roanoke (Meagan Good) has split and is dating rival L.A. Kings' goalie, Jacque "Le Coq" Grande (Justin Timberlake). That's what serves as plot in a film that's really a series of Saturday Night Live sketches that comes across as almost a Mike Myers vanity project.

The gags, verbal and sight, are anything but witty unless you're amused by sophomoric acronyms like Pitka's advice to Be Loving & Open With My Emotions (get it?); with bathroom-humor names like Ben Kingsley's Tugginmypudha, and the name of Pitka Indian fishing village, Harenmahkeester. The sight yuks including two elephants coupling in the hockey stadium, a fight between two aspiring guru teams in India with mops soaked with urine, and a chastity belt that Tugginmypuddha attached to twelve-year-old Pitka which he must wear until he learns to love himself (like Mike Myers, obviously). The midget gags feature, of course, Verne Troyer as Toronto Maple Leaf's Coach Cherkov (get it?), but admittedly there's a cute scene of Cherkov's office which is custom made for him and which leads people of average height to find their heads plunging through the ceiling.

Stephen Colbert does some amusing stuff as Jay Kell,one of the two announcers, who together with his partner Trent Lueders,(Jim Gaffigan) try with moderate success to replicate the far better camaraderie between the broadcasters in Christopher Guest"s "Best in Show." One can say about this movie is that it's slightly better than "Austin Powers as Goldmember." Movie buffs know this is damning "The Love Guru" with faint praise.

Casting Liz Tyler to replace the original "Hulk"'s Jennifer Connelly, Edward Norton in lieu of Eric Bana in the title role and William Hurt taking over from Sam Elliott as General Ross, "The Incredible Hulk" dumbs down the original by overthrowing the complex dialogue of the 2003 version substituting action that is far too rapid to follow but which should please the targeted audience in their teens and twenties who escape into the air-conditioned multiplex from a June heat wave.

Leterrier makes few concessions to those who skipped the Marvel comic, the TV series starring Lou Ferrigno or the Ang Lee movie version, but listen closely to the dialogue and you'll know that physicist Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is determined to find a cure from a botched gamma radiation experiment that turned him into a huge green monster whenever his blood pressure hits 200. As co-written by Zak Penn ("X-Men: The Last Stand") and by star Edward Norton (who was reportedly disappointed that the movie was cut down to 114 minutes), "The Incredible Hulk" finds fugitive scientist Banner working in a Brazilian bottling plant while he e-mails scientist Professor Samuel Sterns, a cellular biologist who might provide him with a cure. Meanwhile General Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt), who happens to be the father of Banner's ex, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), sets out among the Cariocas with a small regiment to capture the man in the hope of turning the soldiers into formidable hulks.

The movie's best part is the first half hour, before the monster ever appears and the drama rests on human dimensions. Banner shows the bottling supervisor that he's "too smart" for day labor by fixing the equipment whenever it breaks down, but he doesn't watch his blood pressure as the U.S. army closes in, sending Banner racing across rooftops, emerging as The Incredible Hulk. As the monster, he will take on military machine guns, bazookas, bombs and a powerful wind machine, crashing choppers out of the sky, throwing tanks this way and that, heaving soldiers against walls and trees. He settles down only occasionally, but when he is about to bed his ex as a human being once again, he stuns the poor woman, coitus-interruptus-like, warning her that he is getting too excited.

Ultimately Hulk must battle The Abomination, an even larger foe created from the human body of Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), a career army man who unlike Banner actually wants the power to turn into a monster. The ferocious struggle may remind one of the conflict in Chris Weitz's "The Golden Compass" between two bears, the larger one getting the edge for most of the struggle.

Menzies' camera seems to love the face of Liv Tyler, honing in on her close-up far too many times to capture her signature look of sympathy and concern for the Hulk, a woman who threatens "Never speak to me again as your daughter" when she discovers her father's motivation to take down her lover. "The Incredible Hulk," surprisingly, works best on a human level, turning into caricature when the monsters have their way with the mere mortals, but then I'm showing my age. This is, after all, a summer movie that delivers the smashes, crashes, and shoot-ups reminiscent of 1950's sci-fi movies, with the Hulk's caring not at all about petrol's four dollars a gallon since he can readily fly from Brazil to Guatemala to Mexico to Virginia to New York and ultimately British Columbia without suffering the torments of coach.