Another reboot stink burger from the morons who thought there was a way resurrect this property after two previous, unimpressive duds from a director who went on to do much better work I loved (Pacific Rim readily comes to mind). I mean Del Toro beat incredible odds by winning an Oscar® for a monster-love story which is best described as Grinding Nemo. With Hellboy, he knew to walk away when the public would never get into Mike Mignola’s creation; it’s pretty cool as a comic book, decent as animation and looks fantastic movie-wise. No one can translate it to film with an equally exciting story in my opinion; I’ve provided my review from 2004 at the end.
I did have some hope with this movie when David Harbour was cast to play the title character. However, the whole flick goes down the crapper within the first ten minutes as the BPRD is now a UK organization, all the Allied heroes who witnessed Hellboy’s birth are semi-immortal, all the companions are different and one is completely lame. Here comes the spoiler which I have no trouble revealing and I’m doing anyone reading this a favor…he saves the world due to be a descendent of King Arthur on his mother’s side. Why does it matter? Something to do with Excalibur being needed to slay the villainess Nimue the Blood Queen, an under utilized Milla Jovovich. I was so bored watching this, I fell asleep around the second to third act.
Don’t rent this, if it’s still a thing. Don’t bother putting it on your watch list via streaming. Let it die in order to teach the schmucks responsible a lesson. When it turns up to be shown ad nauseum on Spike, TNT, FX and SyFy, change the channel immediately! We saw this at our local discount theater and a felt ripped off.
Now I would like to conclude with what I thought of the 2004 version. My dislike of it hasn’t changed. I did modify my past writing for grammar, clarity and spelling.
Hellboy: This is another glaring example of Hollywood just grabbing a comic-book property without thinking it all the way through. The executives who approved this just sat there drooling over Spider-Man‘s numbers not knowing that Hellboy is slightly more famous than Tank Girl and Judge Dredd. Sadly this movie’s casting was the greatest since The Avengers (Steed & Peel, not Marvel) but it also shared the latter’s feeble plot and poor execution. Ron Perlman is great as Hellboy yet he is just chewing scenery alongside a very skilled John Hurt and Jeffrey Tambor. Everbody else’s acting limps along as you wait for another action scene to end the boredom. The fight scenes are just as contrived as the last pair of Matrix movies too. To paraphrase Scott Kurtz’s (of the online PvP comic fame) complaint, the brawls lacked urgency or a sense of danger. Hellboy struggling against the evasive monster came across as a device to keep the film going when the love triangle was putting everyone to sleep. My other complaint are the villains being the Nazis in 2004. Them being the heavies was recently ruined by their improper usage in The Sum of All Fears (set in contemporary times too) plus they have already been soundly trounced by the Blues Brothers, Mel Brooks and the von Trapp family. Most audiences don’t find them menacing anymore thanks to 19 Arabs killing almost as many people at Pearl Harbor. Hellboy is easily a Rental but with Blockbusters and Hollywoods slowly closing, you won’t be missing anything when this piece of smelly brimstone turns up on TNT’s doorstep.