Review: Hellboy (2019)

Hellboy, directed by Neil Marshall, tells the tale of a literal spawn of Hell (David Harbor) who fights crime and slays monsters for the good of humanity. But when an EVIL ancient queen (Milla Jovovich) threatens to destroy all of humanity through Hellboy’s powers, can the Big Red do what is right to save the world?

Now like many of you I seem to ask myself, “did we honestly need a Hellboy reboot?” The last two Hellboy films from director Guillermo Del Toro seemed to do well enough from both critics and audiences to warrant a third film. Del Toro and actor Ron Perlman seemed totally down to do another Hellboy sequel as well. Sadly, instead of another Del Toro Hellboy, we get whatever the heck this is suppose to be. This new Hellboy trades in all of the imaginative creativity from Del Toro’s alliteration of the character in exchange for a super bloody and violent but cheap, dumb, pathetic excuse of a reboot.

I already expected this film to be bad, but man oh man, it was a lot worse than I’d imagined. The story was absolutely dreadful. There’s a big bad evil queen that Hellboy and the gang needs to stop, but in order to do so they need to make a bunch of detours that go absolutely nowhere. This film includes a ton of scenes that are overall pointless to the overall plot and drag the film down as if it wasn’t long enough; you really do feel the film’s two hour length. The writing was also pretty cringe-worthy. You can tell that a lot of the “humor” was added at the last minute and it makes this whole movie feel cheap.

The editing was an atrocious mess, the CGI gets pretty bad at times, there’s a lot of tell-don’t-show happening that makes this whole film even more aggravating, and the performances were pretty bad as well. David Harbor adds nothing new to the role aside from being able to drop the F-bomb now, Milla Jovovich was over-the-top but not the good kind of over-the-top, Ian McShane basically played Ian McShane, and the rest of the cast was pretty underwhelming too.

What makes this whole film even more aggravating was that there were clear signs of effort that shows up every now and then. Some of the creature make up whenever it’s NOT CG’d over is impressive to look at, and there were a couple action sequences that were actually fun and entertaining, but one in particular is the VERY LAST SHOT OF THE MOVIE. That one cool action sequence is not worth sitting through two hours of dull and boring exposition accompanied by a lot of visual illiteracy.

Overall this was a total hell to sit through. I genuinely couldn’t find myself to enjoy this film in any way, even in an ironic way. This movie is flopping at the box office as of this review and for me personally it’s probably for the best. It makes me sad that instead of what could’ve been a potentially fun sequel to Del Toro’s Hellboy series with Del Toro adding his signature attention to detail in the creature department, we get a soulless, cash-grab of a reboot that thinks just because it’s R-rated means it’s automatically better than the last two films. Do yourself a favor and skip this one.

Final Verdict: 2/10