Hellboy

The new Hellboy flopped at the box office and with critics, and I'm not too happy either. Neil Marshall may have made the solid The Descent and the perfect post-apocalyptic B-movie Doomsday, but Hellboy won't rank among the highlights of his career. There's no story, which is to be expected, but the weird nonsensical jumping from scene to scene felt annoying to the point of artificiality. David Harbour isn't downright bad, but the humour is so dry that I didn't laugh once, which I take as a huge minus. When it comes to the action, it's pretty good to watch, it's very substantial in terms of gore – I can't remember the last time I saw such carnage in the cinema – but it's a great shame things usually end up when they are at their best. Praise should be given to the scene with the giants (which could have been longer), Baba Yaga who had eerily perfect make up, and the finale, which is again too short and doesn't live up to its full potential. It's a shame that outside of the action, the film is rather boring and has nothing to surprise and impress. Thanks to the decent serving of gore and a fair amount of monsters of all kinds, the film is watchable, but I was expecting a more entertaining ride. 60% (04/14/2019)

Having a 50 million-dollar full-length feature written by a debutant screenwriter with no experience in feature-lenght films, and assuming that it will then "somehow" work under the direction of a slasher B-movie director from England, is a really ignorant overestimation. It is therefore fair for the producers that the movie flopped. Although it seems there must have been a serious endeavor to please the comic book’s fans, Cosby's screenplay for this two-hour-long movie just does not work at all, and it appears to be an overpriced and incoherent dud, where the shallow characters have no chemistry between them, and so we cannot feel any sort of emotions from them. Also, their motivations are either completely shallow or straight up just completely random. Hellboy comes across like a computer game, where you are constantly jumping from one location to another, finding a key that will move you on to the next level, in a superficial (and seemingly unnecessary) plot. With all that being said, this movie is a really disgustingly big pile of CGI excrement. However, when I put aside even the most basic expectations I have from any movie (in other words, I switch off my brain), I absolutely did not enjoy this in any way. Actually, after those two hours, I could not figure out how this appalling failure of a movie was supposed to hold my attention. (09/17/2019)

Harbour’s good, with all the right catchphrases. The gigantic outcasts from hell in the climax might be the most impressive ever. The casting of Milla Jovovich appropriately defines the target audience composed of fans of bloody, B-level monster freak-shows. Neil Marshall’s imagination knows no bounds, nor does his courage (or lack of common sense?) to flush such a huge budget down the drain. His Hellboy amuses with its stupidity, excess and craziness, but watching it in a cinema seemed extremely out of place, even bizarre. With the right crew at home, beer and popcorn, I might be inclined to give it three stars. (04/17/2019)

I preferred Del Toro’s vision much more. Although this Hellboy tries to draw more on the comic books, it’s bloodier and ruder, but I miss the fantastic poetry here. Here they simply squander the mass monsters and characters appearing here, only to flit by on the screen, leaving you none the wiser. Harbour’s Hellboy is much more hideous, like a heavy-metal street bum, crossed with the devil. The action is hard and dirty, but full of playfulness and invention. The monsters are really demonic. The witch is so horrible that the sight of her made me feel physically ill. But my two-year-old daughter liked it... (10/31/2021)

My fears were confirmed, this is not at all the Hellboy I wanted to see. I know, maybe they couldn't even manage to cram the bulk of Mignola's years of universe building into a two-hour film that is also not a sequel and has to introduce Hellboy and the team. Someone has tried, and it was a suicide attempt – cheap, unimaginative, overstuffed, and at times (as the trailers warned) almost TV boring and awkward looking. It's similar to the comics in plot, but hardly at all in mood. The film seems to try to mask its lack of atmosphere with gore and all sorts of fucking, but it doesn't even manage to do that properly, and I wasn't particularly curious about anything like that. Hellboy is supposed to be poetic, doom-laden, dramatic, horrific, and yet still entertaining (like the books, like Del Toro's vision), especially since the filmmakers chose The Wild Hunt and The Storm and the Fury as their templates; yet this reboot is none of those things. It can only look up to Del Toro's magical films (and sometimes seems to) because it's worse in every way... Production design? Ridiculously simple. Potentially interesting or entertaining characters? Laughable (poor Lobster). Perhaps everything and everyone lacks heart, and unfortunately that includes Hellboy himself. David Harbour may be a likable actor who won me over in Stranger Things, but he wears a much worse mask than Ron Perlman, and underneath it he overacts, hollers, and prances unnecessarily. Why? If Mike Mignola likes it that way, that's his business. I, however, will continue to prefer to read his books and watch Del Toro's movies, in which Hellboy is Hellboy and which, while they follow their own path, at least have clarity and are not so damn stupid.___P.S. The misery was quite enhanced by the "cool at all costs" Czech subtitles, which sometimes were not even translations but completely made up (probably for dubbing purposes). (04/11/2019)