I was really, really excited about this movie. Unfortunately, it was rather disappointing.

The main problem is that Guillermo del Toro, while quite good at creating stunningly original visuals and an interesting core story, is not all that great at putting together a coherent film. In this regard, he’s much like Terry Gilliam—his movies look great and have an interesting premise, but fall apart when it comes to plot mechanics and details.

There is way too much going on in Hellboy 2, and as a result, none of the individual threads are handled particularly well. Fights go on too long, the plot doesn’t make sense, character development is scattershot, and there are too many moments in the film that seem tacked on or poorly chosen.

More specific complaints below the fold…

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Over at Balloon Juice, John Cole wonders about John McCain’s crack about how exporting cigarettes to Iran is a way of “killing them”:

I understand that the leadership of Iran has said and (most likely has done) any number of odious things, and I understand that certain people who have an Israel first policy are going to have particular issues with Iran. But what I don’t understand is the apparent personal animus towards all thing Iran that the McCain quip seems to betray. I have no beef with Iranians, and I thought that was the right-wing position- our agitation was towards the leadership, and if I am remembering correctly, all the rhetoric from Pipes and company was that we needed to aid the Iranian people and their pro-Democracy forces. Maybe that was then, this is now, and the propagandists now need to paint Iran as a monolithic evil, and the rhetoric has changed. It sure feels like over the past few months and years we are experiencing a hardening of positions against all things Iranian.

John, John, John—the view you describe here is a sensible one, and as such, has no bearing whatsoever on the discussion at hand.

The Republican base doesn’t like foreign people, especially Middle Eastern foreign people, unless we’re talking about the Israelis, who are important for the whole “Left Behind” thing. Sure, a sensible person looks at Iran and understands that while the leaders engage in a bunch of saber-rattling, the people generally like us. Your standard issue Republican, on the other hand, looks at Iran and sees a bunch of brown-skinned terrorists looking to kill every single last one of us at the earliest opportunity.

Beside, this is John McCain we’re talking about here, who routinely confuses Sunnis and Shias, not to mention Iran and Iraq.

From this morning’s Washington Post:

In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.

There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.

The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.

The article goes on to insinuate a frightening nexus between petty criminals, terrorist groups abroad, and possible networks of terror cells within the United States.

Call me crazy, but given the rate at which the U.S. incarcerates people, especially those who are poor, non-white, and who don’t speak English as their first language, is it really any surprise that we’re turning up this many people abroad who have criminal records here?

Presumably, I’m supposed to read stuff like this and lie trembling in my bed, waiting for terrorists to burst in the door, slash my throat, and then nerve-gas my neighborhood. Honestly, though, the story of emigrating to the U.S., getting busted by the cops, going back home, and then getting swept up in some military dragnet just doesn’t seem all that unlikely, and certainly not particularly threatening.