Hellboy (2019) – Review

In 2004, visionary director Guillermo del Toro adapted the Mike Mignola comic Hellboy to the big screen — it didn’t make much money — then in 2008, Del toro followed up that film with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a film even better than the original — and it also didn’t make much money — which of course in Hollywood parlance means it’s time for a REBOOT. This led to the big question, “How does one go about rebooting a series based on comic property that has failed to produce box office gold with its first two swings at bat?” Well apparently, director Neil Marshall, and the people at Lionsgate, thought going for a hard “R” would do the trick, maybe get some of that Deadpool money. Sadly, it takes more than a little gore and a few “F” bombs to make a successful movie.

Do you like films with seemingly endless and tedious exposition? Boy do we have the movie for you. With this reboot of Hellboy, we basically get two hours of people sitting around talking about the plot, then Hellboy will leave to punch a monster before arriving at a new location so that he and his pals can sit around and talk about the plot some more. Whenever someone isn’t reiterating the events we’ve already had explained to us, ad nauseam, director Neil Marshall will then punish us with one of forty or sixty flashback sequences that populate this film — I may be exaggerating a tad, but God does he overkill it with these things — and when we aren’t being subjected to massive expository dumps, our main characters will take side quests that have pretty much no bearing on the plot. If this film had been properly edited, it would be about as long as an episode of Supernatural.

This movie is so jam-packed it should have come with CliffsNotes.

So what exactly is the plot of Neil Marshall’s Hellboy, you ask? Well, in an opening prologue, we learn that back during the Middle Ages a witch named Nimue “The Blood Queen” (Milla Jovovich) was betrayed by her coven and dismembered by Merlin and King Arthur. Her body parts were then placed in separate magically sealed chests and spirited away to the four corners of England. We’re told that she had planned to unleash some deadly plague to wipe out that pesky scourge we call humanity — looking at the world today you can’t really fault her — and something about finding a demonic mate to rule a new world. As far as villains go, Nimue is about as boring and generic as it gets. The movie teases us with some complexity to her character, with Nimue meeting with Arthur to work out some kind of truce and then being betrayed, which could have led to her being a sympathetic character, but the screenplay pretty much ditches all that to give us another snarling harpy bent on world domination.

“Hellboy, have you heard of something called the Me Too movement?”

Then we have Hellboy (David Harbour) as a disgruntled employee of the B.P.R.D. (The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) who is sad that he was forced to kill a friend and fellow agent, that said agent having been turned into a vampiric luchadore — damn but does that sound like a better idea for a movie than what we get here with cliché witches and lame prophesies — and things are made worse by the strained relationship between Hellboy and his adoptive father Professor Broom (Ian McShane), a man who shows not one ounce of fatherly compassion or concern about the fact that he has been sending his son out to do battle against a cadre of monsters on what looks to be a never-ending mission. I love Ian McShane to death, but this version of Broom is more in keeping with McShane’s Al Swearengen character from Deadwood than the kindly father figure from either the comic books or the Guillermo del Toro movies.

“God rest the souls of that poor family… and pussy’s half price for the next 15 minutes.”

In this two-hour reboot, we find Hellboy encountering the aforementioned Lucha libre vampire. After that, he’s sent off to England to aid the British version of the B.P.R.D. in hunting three giants, he then hooks up with an old friend (Sasha Lane) who just so happens to be able to talk to the dead, and then visits with the British M11 agents in their secret headquarters, where he is partnered up with an agent (Daniel Dae Kim), a man with a personal grudge against monsters and considers Hellboy a threat to the world’s safety. Hellboy has a tussle with an ex-changeling pig monster, one that looks a lot like Bebop from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, gets briefly shanghaied by Baba Yaga, who is pissed at him for taking one of her eyes, and then Hellboy has a nice meeting with a briefly resurrected Merlin (Brian Gleeson). Now with all this going on, Hellboy does manage to cross paths with Nimue once or twice, you know the actual villain of this movie, but with the amount of clutter in this film, she’s lost amongst all the noise.

Here’s Team Hellboy, don’t ask me their names as I’ve already forgotten them.

Any one of those encounters listed above could have been made into a solid Hellboy movie, but instead they are all crammed into this one film, and because of this, they are all drastically shortchanged, especially Nimue, who once again I must point out is the film’s primary antagonist. I feel obliged to keep pointing this out because clearly Neil Marshall was unaware of her importance. I have to believe that the filmmakers were more concerned with getting that precious “R” rating than whether or not they had a solid story to tell. The result was a disappointing mishmash without any heart or soul, which are two key components in telling a good Hellboy story.

As for that “R” rating, well all they managed to do was stuff obtrusively bad gore into lame sequences, and create moments that were chocked full of terrible CGI monsters rampaging through the streets of London, which is truly a shame because we do get practical effects and make-up used to create many of the creatures in this film, and they are all quite good, but the film undercuts this wonderful work by shoving cheap computer-generated images in our faces.

Shouldn’t this thing be off fighting Scooby-Doo and the gang?

Neil Marshall has a solid resume with this genre, having given us such films as Dog Soldiers, Doomsday, and the Descent, but with his take on Hellboy we get none of the fun or terror found in his earlier works. All the jokes fall flat, which is pretty bad considering the Hellboy comics are basically horror-comedy, and none of the characters develop into anything remotely memorable, and when words like “prophecy” and “destiny” are bandied about, we can only roll our eyes in despair. There is some solid action sequences to be found in this movie, choregraphed fights that you can actually follow, and Harbour does try his best with the material given — some of it being pretty bad — but he’s mostly guilty of not being Ron Perlman.

I was sad when I first heard that Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman were not going to be allowed to finish the story they had worked so hard on, yet I was not going to hold that against Neil Marshall and David Harbour; I truly wanted this film to succeed because I love that character, but sadly, the end result was certainly not a case of third time’s the charm.

Note: The film teases us with further stories, even promising us the return of Abe Sapien — who was greatly missed in this outing — and more of the wonderful 1930s vigilante Lobster Johnson (Thomas Haden Church), but I honestly doubt we will be getting a fourth Hellboy movie any time soon.