Hellboy is a 2019 superhero movie by Neil Marshall. It stars David Harbour as Hellboy who is caught between our and supernatural world as he prepares to take on Nimue / The Blood Queen (played by Milla Jovovich) and stop her from destroying the world. Hellboy (2019) movie review
It is not clear what went wrong with this movie. It was a huge flop at the box office and the critical reception was pretty bad. Sad to see for a movie that was geared to be big in a world of R-rated superhero movies. Many people blame the writing, the dialogue, the look (many scenes were CGI and it looks awful). Most agree that it was not able to capture the charm of the Hellboy of Guillermo del Toro. Besides these things, which could sink just about any movie at the box office, some people claimed the movie failed to connect with the audience. By focusing on being faithful to the comics, it isolated many other movie goers. Particularly ones who will not understand all the references from the comics that were thrown around.
Hellboy for the most part looks good. This one is more grittier and he looks a lot more menacing than Del Toro’s. He drinks, swears, kills, and tries to figure out whether he is a savior of mankind or a killer. However, all of the people he converses with are horrible. They are not memorable, their stories are not told well, and they are just there to pad out some time.
For example, and this might be a small spoiler, Hellboy’s female sidekick, Alice Monaghan, played by Sasha Lane, suddenly has some ass kicking powers that she never had before. Instead of flying and kicking ass, she is given a power where she takes souls of bad guys. How is this explained? Well she says some weird shit is happening to her and that’s that.
On top of character we can’t identify with, we have action scenes that are not interesting and many times CGI’d to death. Take the fight with giants. It looks like a video game cutscene that has Hellboy fighting bunch of invisible giants. Also getting thrown about in a way that seems very fake and unconvincing. The giants were fine but the way it was filmed made it look like Hllboy was fighting in front of a green screen. Personally it took me out of the movie and I lost interest. All the other monsters (manbearpig and Baba Yaga) are done well. One scene with giant monsters going through downtown is especially cool to watch as they were unique creatures. This is something director wanted to do to distance himself from Del Toro’s movies.
Unfortunately, this movie failed to impress fans and regular movie goers alike, cutting its chances of getting a sequel down to zero. There were a lot of rumors of disagreements, fights, and rewrites to script happening on the set. This is never good news for a movie trying to be big, live up to hype, and even set itself apart to previous movies. No matter how much one tries not to compare it to older movies based on the same character, the audience will always know and will compare it. This will either make or break the movie but that’s the risk a director is taking.
Overall the movie is just OK, but it was plagued by too many problems. What caused it to flop is unknown but there is way too many things that certainly didn’t help it stand out in a good way. Do yourself a favor and go watch the original Hellboy movies.
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