REVIEW: 'Hellboy' traps its sturdy star in bad-movie purgatory
Sasha Lane, David Harbour and Daniel Dae Kim in Hellboy, directed by Neil Marshall.
The Hellboy character is admittedly a tough sell. He’s bright red, horned, and half-devil. Most casual moviegoers might assume he’s a bad guy. In an era when movies with comic book villains as the leads are becoming more common, you could be forgiven for assuming that a new Hellboy movie is just part of the broadening roster of villain-centric movies, like the upcoming Joaquin Phoenix-starring Joker or Margot Robbie-fronted Birds of Prey.
It appears that the filmmakers behind Hellboy’s latest big-screen outing are also confused about what makes Big Red tick. The incarnation in the two Guillermo del Toro Hellboy movies, from 2004 and 2008, organically learns about his origins and grapples with what it means. But in Neil Marshall’s new version, the same information is delivered with all the subtlety of tumbling into a fiery chasm.
Hellboy himself is well-portrayed by David Harbour, and there are some fun shout-outs to some of the more obscure characters and story threads from the comics. But that’s about all the good there is to say. The filmmakers are more concerned with grafting cringe-inducing scenes into an interpretation of the comic that might have had genuine promise in other hands.
Again, to its limited credit, the movie doesn’t get bogged down in typical origin-story tropes. We pick up Hellboy’s story after he’s been hunting monsters for the U.S. government (in a branch called the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense) for decades. We don’t get a neophyte young agent as an audience proxy (like Rupert Evans’ character in Del Toro’s 2004 movie) and Hellboy’s existence isn’t a secret - in fact, he’s a bit of a celebrity.
This strong footing aside, the movie’s next steps are unsteady. Andrew Cosby’s screenplay attempts to set up a strained relationship between Hellboy and his adoptive father, the paranormal researcher Dr. Trevor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane). But the writing here is consistently surface-level - other than the characters shouting at each other about “destiny” and Hellboy’s resentment about being “treated like a goddamn weapon”, the script doesn’t go any deeper. Hellboy ends up sounding more like a petulant teenager than an immortal demon. It seems to be more in service of setting up a brief change of allegiance during the climax than a commentary on father/son relationships.
Milla Jovovich as the film’s main villain, Nimue the Blood Queen.
In the lead role, Harbour does nail the tone and personality captured in Mike Mignola’s comics, that of a blue-collar worker just completing a shift, ridding the Earth of monsters. There’s clearly some common DNA between Harbour’s breakthrough work as Hopper on Stranger Things and his approach to Hellboy: both characters are world-weary and calloused, but ultimately pure-hearted. Sadly, the script falls into a rhythm of skimping on theme or character development in favour of setting up chances for Harbour to crack wise about the plot. The jokes are funny on their own, but after a while, they begin to rob the movie of forward motion.
The herky-jerky pacing makes the whole experience harder to watch. There’s no building tension or clear time scale to follow; characters occasionally jump around in space and time, making it difficult to care about them. Often, it simply looks like sequences were abruptly chopped from the edit at the last minute, making exchanges between characters far more awkward than they need to be.
The arc from the comics that provides much of the film’s story had plenty of potential: it pits Hellboy against a fifth-century witch called Nimue, the Queen of Blood (Milla Jovovich) who was chopped into pieces by King Arthur and imprisoned in a handful of caskets scattered across Britain. Nimue’s return unveils long-hidden details about Hellboy’s connection to King Arthur, forcing him to confront his prophesied destiny as the Beast of the Apocalypse.
However, in the hands of Marshall and Cosby, almost all the material with the villains feels like offcuts from a different movie. Jovovich phones in much of her performance, and pulls some groan-worthy faces when her character is outwitted in a couple of scenes. Her majordomo, an Irish spirit called the Gruagach (voiced by Stephen Graham), is stripped of much of the motivation his character had on the page, where he attempted to restore the fairy people of Britain, who have been oppressed by humanity. The Gruagach is rendered instead as a dimwitted flunky, prone to cursing incoherently (“I’ll pull your fookin’ head off, you fookin’ wanker!”, etc.)
The movie steps up the violence to an excessive degree.
A brief word on the R rating. I initially applauded the news that this Hellboy would be more violent and more profane than Del Toro’s version - not because Hellboy inherently needs that approach, but just to see what the filmmakers would do with the more adult-oriented aspects of the source material. Instead, Marshall’s film is like the work of a teenage edgelord, pushing the boundaries of good taste for the sake of shock value. In one egregious scene during the climax, the filmmakers seem to take gleeful pleasure in finding new ways to massacre extras. And many characters (like the aforementioned Gruagach) curse like children who have just learned a naughty word.
I firmly believe that someday we may get another (good) Hellboy movie. I’d even be happy to see Harbour return to the role. Marshall’s film merely serves as a repetition of the age-old filmmaking lesson: you can have great components - source material, casting, production design, cinematography - but you still need to put them together in an effective way. As it stands, the producers won’t be able to enjoy any pancakes for a while.
Hellboy gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Thomas Haden Church as Lobster Johnson was a highlight - he would have been right at home in Del Toro’s movies.
Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane) and Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) were largely wasted.
If the filmmakers wanted to sell us on Hellboy feeling rebellious, they should have tried adapting the Roger the Homunculus thread from the Conqueror Worm story.