Hellboy (Dir. Neil Marshall, 2h1m)

 

There are some films I've personally regretted seeing. Baywatch. Night School. Transformers: The Last Knight. Hellboy is another; a grumpy, grimy, gory, gritty, goddamn waste of two hours. Rebooting Del Toro's nuanced and enjoyable rendition of the Mike Mignola comic book in which a demon summoned to earth becomes an important asset of a shadowy government organisation in their battle against everything demonic and otherwordly, so Neil Marshall all but makes a mockery of the character, in a messy, badly shot, badly cut, boring, overlong sanitised, MTVitised version of a beloved character, in something that feels more like a mid 2000s superhero film than a worthy successor to Del Toro's rendition.

The problems with Hellboy'19 begin almost immediately, with the film's tone. Its opening spiel, setting up Milla Jovovich's Nimue, (perhaps the best thing in the film, if only because Jovovich is at least enjoying herself playing a scenery chewing witch bent on destroying the world), and her imprisonment of various body parts in caskets across the UK by King Arthur is meant to be serious. However, the narration by Ian McShane (who plays Hellboy's surrogate father,  cracks overly sweary jokes about the dark ages being "really fucking dark", the grubby, greys and browns of the period, whilst trying to give the scenes a ye olde worlde look, just make it difficult to work out what's going on, and the generally overly gory violence should have been a warning sign.

Because this is what the majority of the film is like, as we're brought up to the modern day, and, after failing to bring in a colleague who, dying, warns him that the end is nigh, Hellboy is brought in and promptly dispatched to the UK, to deal with Nimue, bringing along Alice (a likable, if utterly underused Sasha Lane), a girl he rescued from fairies as a child, and shapeshifting soldier, Ben Daimo (Daniel Dae Kim) along for the journey. So the film stomps joylessly through setpieces, spattered with cheap one liners, splattersome violence-the bodycount is, at points, ludicrously high, the gore practically giallo, particularly in a computer-game esque battle between Hellboy and three giants, and the finale muted and a lazy retread of the key message of the first Del Toro film in its destiny-nature versus nurture ending.

Aside from his impressive makeup and physique, the biggest disappointment is Hellboy himself. David Harbour, to be utterly blunt, does not have the gravitas, the fun, the humour, or indeed, seemingly, the ability to be Hellboy. Despite the less complex makeup,one gets the feeling of Harbour being stifled by it-Perlman was able to act with it, make us forget this was an actor in fairly heavy makeup and prosthetics, but Harbour seems set in a permanently rictus scowl, through which he growls pretty much every line in either a monotone, or occasionally a pained howl. Harbour looks bored throughout, even at the film's finale.

Not only this, but between the gore, that looks like it's been slapped on in post-production, the bad CGI and the weird-as-balls soundtrack that seems to be a set of songs anyone last cared about in mid 2016 dumped in like a Spotify playlist on shuffle, there's a sense of a film that doesn't know whether it wants to appeal to the crude sensibilities of the teenage chunk of his audience, muted and self-censored as it is in places, complete with the loss of its hero's cigar chomping habit, or to a slightly older demographic who remember the Del Toro films well enough for the film to feel more like a long-expected sequel, rather than a full reboot. This muddled identity only adds to the film's messy atmosphere.

But perhaps the biggest mistake of the film is that no-one really wanted it in the first place-it steps through a previously adapted section of the comic, with familiar story beats, adding nothing but grimy dull CGI in comparison to the lush practical effects of Del Toro's films, nothing but grumbling indifference in the place of an actor who fully became his role, and replaced a much loved set of heroes with bit-part players who never really get the time to explore their characters, let alone do anything of worth. There is also the bigger problem that, frankly, there was no real need for a reboot of Hellboy-it smacks of a Hollywood running so quickly out of ideas it cannibalises a film series barely a decade old, and makes a pigs' ear of it.


A needless, bloody bloody, bloody boring, bloody bad mess of a film. Even if you're a big fan of the big red guy with the big red arm, avoid this. It's nothing short of a disservice, despite some new bangs and whistles, to the Del Toro films, and indeed to the comics.

Rating: Avoid