Well… this is going to be interesting. After being stuck
with the flu for the past several days, I’m finally getting around to what is
already being heralded as one of the worst comic book movies ever made. Oh, the
joys of critical hyperbole. Not to say that this film doesn’t have its issues
but, compared to some of the worser flicks I’ve covered on here like Fant4stic, Venom and even Justice League, this doesn’t even come close.
The supporting cast around him is pretty solid too, from
Sasha Lane as the medium Alice to Thomas Haden Church making one hell of an
impression as the Nazi hunter Lobster Johnson, even Milla Jovovich does
decently as the big bad of the story. The one sticking point though is a pretty
major one, that being Ian McShane as Hellboy’s surrogate father. He’s not
outright bad, but his performance did mark the one part that made me seriously
miss the Del Toro films. That, and wishing that John Hurt was still with us.
The messier, more grotesque visage on Anung Un Rama this
time around basically sets the tone for the film surrounding him, as this marks
yet another R18+ rarity in mainstream cinemas over here. Naturally, that means
that this film is loaded with gore, gruesome contortions of the humanoid body
and a level of swearing that gets dangerously close to tryhard territory. The
CGI fidelity can get very wonky in places, showing Millennium Films’ B-movie
tendencies in a less-than-ideal fashion, but it’s difficult to gripe too much
about that with all the quite glorious carnage that goes on. That, and the soundtrack
definitely helped; seeing Hellboy fight giants set to Muse’s Psycho isn’t
something I’m going to argue with.
Where it gets weird is that, beneath the hard-R visage, the
guts of the story are very familiar. Almost too familiar, considering the flashback
sequence of Hellboy’s arrival on Earth that feels like the straight-to-DVD
version of what Del Toro gave us. It’s still a story about Hellboy coming to
terms with his place as a demon fighting for humans who only see him as another
enemy, with plenty of shared imagery to give some unwelcome feelings of déjà vu.
To makes matters more complicated, while this is officially a reboot separate
from past films, it weirdly works as the trilogy closer we never really got.
Yeah, it’s not a perfect synergy, but as a look at the destroyer that Hellboy
could become, it gives the most vivid depiction of that possibility so far.
But ultimately, directly comparing this to the previous
films feels slightly unfair because this is a different beast altogether. Where
Del Toro delved further into the mystical aspects of the source material, this
film feels like it’s grabbing onto the ‘urban’ part of its urban fantasy
setting. It still
keeps the fantastical in mind, like with the child-eating witch Baba Yaga, the
admittedly cheesy inclusion of King Arthur mythology (which somehow turns out
sillier than when literal children were acting it out earlier this year), and
even the opening with a luchador wrestling vampire, but it’s clearly more
interested in the grit than the grandeur. As good as Del Toro's films were, they almost seemed ashamed of their origins as comic book films, whereas this is more than happy to embrace them, for good and for ill.
And honestly, because of that, this can stand comfortably
beside the previous films. It may not be as effective as what came before, but
because of its drastically different tone and direction, a case can at least be
made that this could appeal to different tastes than the others. My place in
the minority about this flick probably robs any recommendation of its meaning,
but if you want a bloodier take on Hellboy on the big screen, I’d say this is
worth checking out. It’s a decent flick.
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