Tuesday 30 April 2019

Hellboy (2019) - Movie Review



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.

While the redesign takes a bit of getting used to, David Harbour in the title role works pretty damn well. He’s been raring for a leading action role for a while now, and as this decidedly grungier version of the character that Ron Perlman previously made a household name, he hits the right mixture of impulsive, surly and conflicted that the character needs.

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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