A Reel Review: HELLBOY

In 2004, visionary director Guillermo del Toro brought the popular comic character HELLBOY, a demon living among us fighting for good, to the big screen. That film and it’s 2008 sequel were loving homages to the monster movies of old, and the amount of care put into it was evident and showed that HELLBOY was in the right hands. Guillermo’s HELLBOY 3 never happened, and here in 2019 a new batch of filmmakers reset the board for a brand-new version. 

Hellboy (David Harbour), working for the secret organization BPRD (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense), which is led by his adapted father Trevor (Ian McShane), races to stop a resurrected medieval sorceress known as the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich), from regaining her power and destroying mankind. 

For a sci-fi/fantasy film, HELLBOY has a lot going on. There’s the race to stop the Blood Queen from re-assembling her hacked-up body parts, a sub-plot with King Arthur and his legendary sword Excalibur, a treacherous secret society, mediums who talk to the dead, giants who feast on human bones, and Hellboy’s daddy-issues while he discovers his past and ancestry. The plot quickly becomes convoluted as the structure of the film falls into a clunky pattern of lets-talk-things-over followed by fight-the-bad-guys and then repeat the cycle over and over again. It’s redundant to the point of predictable, and predictable leads to boring. The talking-things-over scenes get dull in a hurry, as “darkness covering the world” is mentioned over and over; the word “darkness” feels like it’s uttered 10 billion times. 

With so much being crammed in, the film feels rushed with no time to fill in the important details. The BPRD gets no background or framework at all, and the characters have no time to breath or express themselves. The action is CGI overload and despite a generous amount of bloodshed and bodies being torn to bits…just comes off as bland and uninspired. And the problems just keep rolling in; the editing is a hack-job (Milla Jovovich doesn’t look like she was ever on the same set as everyone else), many scenes are pointless (Hellboy is betrayed and makes a deal with a crab-woman which never comes back around), characters act without explanation (Hellboy is betrayed for no reason, and Trevor has a potty-mouth for, again, no reason), the tone shifts in awkward ways (we go from horror to comedy in weird places), and inconsistencies all over (Hellboy is supposed to working for a secret organization, but he walks around in open public and no one even blinks at him). It’s just a mess from top to bottom. The CGI is cartoony, and Hellboy’s face is a mix between an extreme bitter-beer-face and a wax figure that’s half-melted. 

Acting is all over the place. David Harbour sounds like he’d make a good Hellboy, but he can’t seem to get through the 50 pounds of rubber and makeup. Milla Jovovich is like a plank of wood, and Ian McShane gets derailed by the all the goddamn swearing that has no context.  The lone bright spots are young Sasha Lane who is an old friend of Hellboy, and Daniel Dae Kim as a BPRD soldier with a secret. 

This version of HELLBOY went through a lot of turmoil during production; ranging from director Neil Marshall being consistently messed with by the 16 (!) different producers, and the cast members being in a minor state of revolt. Many movies have troubled productions and can pull it together on the screen, but this giant mess makes it obvious the wrong hands were involved. This movie can go right to hell. 

BOTTOM LINE: Fuck it