Ah Hellboy! What did you do?
We waited 11 years for you. We still thought that even though there will be no Perlman or Del Toro for the third movie, the Hellboy reboot could turn out interesting given the David Harbour and Neil Marshall team up, and the wealth of stories to be told from the Dark Horse comic books. Well, the interesting bits in 2019's Hellboy are not for all, and the Perlman and del Toro shoes are too big for Harbour and Marshall.
Funnily it starts off ludicrous enough as a sword and sorcery tale in the Dark Ages. King Arthur's magical sword Excalibur is probably the most popular sword in the world- Michael Bay filched it for Transformers Last Knight and here it is again, putting evil (in the form of a sorceress Blood Queen Nimue) to rest. All that poor Nimue wants, like most evil characters, is to rid the world of humans and then rule, but she is cut to pieces and hidden all around England.
Cue to present day, where Hellboy hunts a missing agent who has been turned into a vampire. Hellboy handily stakes him, but something is causing the age of monsters upon us it seems, and it is not the titular horned destroyer of worlds. Seems a Gruagach's revenge on Hellboy is to be achieved by bringing Nimue back to life. Baba Yaga- Hellboy's nemesis features and Hellboy ups his investigation and this leads to the best action set-piece in the movie- an ultra violent fight with 3 giants. However it ends fast, and the film does not have any sequence that touches the highs as this one does.
Hellboy quickly moves to make his own team (Alice- the good witch, and Ben- the were-jaguar), and a showdown between Nimue and Hellboy is imminent when she attacks London with a plague. Hellboy has to attain his true demonic state to rid the world of Nimue. This climactic battle is what the movie builds towards, but surprisingly it never happens. Expectations go crash, boom and bang- to quote Roxette.
Baba Yaga: They will build statues of you from the bones of your enemies! Hellboy: Gonna need a XXXX-ton of bones.
Hellboy 2019 tries to pander exclusively to fans. It embraces it's R rating, and there is no holding back on the gore, the dismemberments, the endless spurts of blood, and chopped off heads, and the spilled out guts. It sure is not for the faint hearted- that we have to agree. And David Harbour does deliver on Hellboy's profanity infused sardonic wit. For most fans, these two factors are good enough. The violence may not be everything for all, especially it is a launch sandwiched between family friendly flicks such as Captain Marvel, Shazam and upcoming Avengers Endgame. The support characters are not as nuanced as del Toro's version, and the CGI is spotty at best.
Like Shazam, Hellboy is a movie that has stayed close to it's source. However, Hellboy's source is a niche audience. If you are that audience, the movie is a blast (sans the anti-climatic climax). If you are not that audience, then stay away. 7/10
We waited 11 years for you. We still thought that even though there will be no Perlman or Del Toro for the third movie, the Hellboy reboot could turn out interesting given the David Harbour and Neil Marshall team up, and the wealth of stories to be told from the Dark Horse comic books. Well, the interesting bits in 2019's Hellboy are not for all, and the Perlman and del Toro shoes are too big for Harbour and Marshall.
Funnily it starts off ludicrous enough as a sword and sorcery tale in the Dark Ages. King Arthur's magical sword Excalibur is probably the most popular sword in the world- Michael Bay filched it for Transformers Last Knight and here it is again, putting evil (in the form of a sorceress Blood Queen Nimue) to rest. All that poor Nimue wants, like most evil characters, is to rid the world of humans and then rule, but she is cut to pieces and hidden all around England.
Cue to present day, where Hellboy hunts a missing agent who has been turned into a vampire. Hellboy handily stakes him, but something is causing the age of monsters upon us it seems, and it is not the titular horned destroyer of worlds. Seems a Gruagach's revenge on Hellboy is to be achieved by bringing Nimue back to life. Baba Yaga- Hellboy's nemesis features and Hellboy ups his investigation and this leads to the best action set-piece in the movie- an ultra violent fight with 3 giants. However it ends fast, and the film does not have any sequence that touches the highs as this one does.
Hellboy quickly moves to make his own team (Alice- the good witch, and Ben- the were-jaguar), and a showdown between Nimue and Hellboy is imminent when she attacks London with a plague. Hellboy has to attain his true demonic state to rid the world of Nimue. This climactic battle is what the movie builds towards, but surprisingly it never happens. Expectations go crash, boom and bang- to quote Roxette.
Baba Yaga: They will build statues of you from the bones of your enemies! Hellboy: Gonna need a XXXX-ton of bones.
Hellboy 2019 tries to pander exclusively to fans. It embraces it's R rating, and there is no holding back on the gore, the dismemberments, the endless spurts of blood, and chopped off heads, and the spilled out guts. It sure is not for the faint hearted- that we have to agree. And David Harbour does deliver on Hellboy's profanity infused sardonic wit. For most fans, these two factors are good enough. The violence may not be everything for all, especially it is a launch sandwiched between family friendly flicks such as Captain Marvel, Shazam and upcoming Avengers Endgame. The support characters are not as nuanced as del Toro's version, and the CGI is spotty at best.
Like Shazam, Hellboy is a movie that has stayed close to it's source. However, Hellboy's source is a niche audience. If you are that audience, the movie is a blast (sans the anti-climatic climax). If you are not that audience, then stay away. 7/10