It is to the eternal shame of Hollywood that the final part of Guillermo del Toro’s wonderful Hellboy trilogy never came to fruition. Fortunately, just two years after del Toro confirmed that Hellboy 3 definitely won’t be happening, we’ve got a reboot courtesy of director Neil Marshall, with Stranger Things’ David Harbour in the title role. Unfortunately, it is a boring, ugly, useless film.
A hasty prologue takes us back to the Dark Ages. Nimue the immortal Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich) is betrayed by King Arthur and his wizard Merlin, who chop her up and hide her limbs across Britain. In the present day, Hellboy is reluctantly running errands for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, run by his adoptive father Trevor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane). When old enemies team up to reassemble Nimue, Hellboy and co. must fight to save humanity from her wrath. Standard superhero stuff involving portals and hordes of monsters ensues.
Thematically, this is a re-hash of the del Toro films, seeing Hellboy grapple with the unfortunate fact that it is his destiny to bring about the apocalypse (bummer!) while the villain tries to convince him that the humans are the real monsters. The reboot, however, is inferior in every conceivable way. Wit and charm is done away with entirely, botched sentimentality replaces romance, and lifeless CGI substitutes exquisite practical effects and production design. Even Hellboy’s makeup is worse.
Press leading up to the film repeatedly promised that it would be more faithful to Mike Mignola’s adored comic book series. But while it’s true that it plunders various storylines from its source material, there’s nothing resembling the Gothic atmosphere or gorgeous expressionism of Mignola’s original work.
This might sound like the moaning of a disgruntled fan; and yes, it sort of is. But even if we were to imagine for a moment that there were no del Toro films, that there wasn’t a rich history of comic book mythos, there’s still no getting around the fact that the rebooted Hellboy is an atrocious film in its own right. So bad, you might be surprised that it’s not part of the DC Extended Universe.
Most of the blame has to go to the awful screenplay, which is unfunny and jumbled. The gleeful exploitation of its age rating (a ‘15’ certificate here, an ‘R’ in the US) exposes an aimless, adolescent mentality: every character is obnoxiously swear-y, which is to say that none of them have distinct voices; and, despite ample gore, none of the film’s cartoonish violence is effective. Again, no thanks to the effects team – blood has never looked so jammy.
The convoluted plot takes on Spider-Man 3 levels of villain-cramming. Hellboy fights a vampire dressed as a luchador; Hellboy fights some giants; Hellboy repeatedly fights Gruagach (Stephen Graham), a humanoid boar seeking vengeance (cue one of the many terrible flashback scenes). A genuinely creepy run-in with the Baba Yaga – a spidery Russian witch who lives in a chicken-legged house – is far and away the film’s best sequence. But even this is just a narrative detour that ultimately serves to further trip up the film’s pacing and stretch its cruel two hour runtime.
Jovavich does well as the actual villain, even if her character is only an assemblage of clichés, and Harbour is a decent Hellboy. Daniel Dae Kim brings much-needed charisma to the paper-thin role of Ben Daimio, a soldier working with the BPRD, though his posh English accent is questionable. Worse is Sasha Lane as spirit medium Alice Monaghan, whose own cockney accent will have Brits’ eyes rolling to the back of their heads. Worse still is Ian McShane, who seems to have entirely lost his powers of speech. (Seriously, go back to the trailer and listen to how he pronounces the word ‘darkness’.)
McShane’s scenes with Harbour fall completely flat – Bruttenholm’s interaction with Hellboy never feels remotely believable, nevermind paternal. It’s a massive problem for the film, for it is in the fraught relationship between Hellboy and his father that the film desperately grasps for something resembling emotional resonance. Things look especially bad compared to John Hurt’s wonderfully sensitive portrayal in the original Hellboy.
Ah, I’m back at del Toro again. Well, anyone who has seen the earlier Hellboy entries – in other words, the film’s target audience – is going to have a hard time not comparing them, and fair enough. This mess of a movie makes those sincere, funny films seem like a miracle. This, by comparison, is hell.
Hellboy is out in cinemas now, distributed by Lionsgate.