Seeing as this is my first official review, I was excited to find out I get a free ice cream and popcorn to enjoy while I settle in for what I hope is a fun, silly move. Straight out of the gate I wasn’t sure that the movie had started. I thought I was watching a bad perfume commercial but then when the first of many exposition explosions happened I was instantly worried about what lay ahead. When people are asked what they look for in a partner, inevitably, they bring up confidence. Confidence is an appealing and alluring characteristic and something that I never felt about this film.
Hellboy (Dir. Neil Marshall) is a reboot from two well-received films by Guillermo del Toro. It follows the titular Hellboy (David Harbour), who as his name suggests is literally a boy from Hell, and his adventures of protecting the world from all manners of ghouls, goblins, giants and in this case, the immortal witch Nimue the Blood Queen, hammed up beautifully by Milla Jovovich.
If I had confidence in the film I would assume that early on when Hellboy allows a scorpion to crawl along his arm and then sting him, it was alluding to the fable of The Scorpion and the Frog and the message that we can not repress out nature, even if it is in our best interest. However, it lacked any finesse so that it felt like we were being beaten over the head with the theme. Throughout the movie, characters continually repress themselves for a variety of unrelatable or unhelpful reasons, only to create a reveal that a blind person could see coming.
Visually the movie looked a lot worse than the original two films. There were many green screen messes where the characters were clearly not inhabiting the same world space as the CGI creatures they were interacting with. David Harbour looked great as Hellboy, but I couldn’t help but feel that Ron Perlman’s Hellboy from 2004 looked better, more believable, more organic.
This is not a knock on Habour’s performance as Hellboy. He throws himself into the role, it is just a little strange that this character who has been around since World War 2 acts like a petulant teenager. Once again the gruff, cynical interpretation of the character in the original movies was a lot more sympathetic and enjoyable to watch and ultimately, easier to care about.
Time and time again there were quagmires of exposition to wade through, which you can sort of defend due to the film trying to reboot this character. I would argue that most of the intended audience would already have some understanding of the character and wasting screen time on backstories rather than pushing the story forward made the audience unsettled. The terrible moments were when the film was clearly trying for a comedic moment and no one in the audience laughed.
This disconnect happened many times in many ways. Primarily this issue is revealed between Hellboy and the villain Nimue. She never seemed to have a reason for being evil, she was just evil to be evil and to give Hellboy something to fight against. The question is why should we care.
She is meant to be a leader of all of the “horrible” things in the world. All of the things that humans find repulsive and have condemned into the shadows. Hellboy is meant to be one of these “horrible” things but has turned good because he was raised by a human. It was as if your appearance defines your character, which once again makes no sense because Jovovich is a beautiful woman so by the film’s logic she would be one of the best people.
Everyone in the film clearly tried hard and no one was sleepwalking through their roles but the film didn’t know what it is. There are stories about the issues behind the scenes which after seeing the film sounds very believable. For a film so wrapped up with having people express their true nature, this film didn’t live its own theme. If I had confidence in this film I might have gone with things, but it never made me feel like it knew what it was doing, but hey, at least I got a free ice cream.
12 April 2019
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe