HELLBOY: The Most Faithful Adaptation To The Mignola Comics Happens To Be Its Most Awful

Genre: Action, Adventure, Horror, Fantasy

Produced by: Lawrence Gordon, Mike Richardson, Lloyd Levin, John Thompson, Les Weldon

Directed by: Neil Marshall

Written by: Andrew Crosby, Christopher Golden, Mike Mignola

Production Company: Lionsgate

Starring: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Daniel Dae Kim, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, Penelope Mitchell, Thomas Haden Church, Sophie Okonedo 

Runtime: 121 minutes                                            

SYNOPSIS: 

Hellboy (David Harbour) is sent to London, England to battle giants, only to realize that his real threat is Vivian Nimue a.k.a. the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich).  Joining forces with fellow B.P.R.D members Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane) and Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim), the red demon must stop the evil witch from executing her world-destruction plan, while also learning more about his past that forces him to question himself. Is he the one to lead the world away from destruction or rather, lead the world towards destruction? 

REVIEW: 

What would a Hellboy movie be like without Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman? True, the pair doesn’t own Hellboy. And true, Hellboy is a product of Mike Mignola’s creative mind. But also true, their collaboration in Hellboy (2004) & Hellboy II: the Golden Army (2008) help plant the early seeds for the hero’s rise towards stardom. From being an obscure character pre-Del Toro era, Hellboy has grown to become the genre’s most popular superhero post-Del Toro era. It is only made easier when Del Toro’s movies were great movies. 

By then, it was only a matter of when rather than if there was going to be a Hellboy 3. Del Toro and Ron Perlman were keen on returning. Sadly, money stood in the way. In an era when superhero movies are required to reach the billion dollar mark, Del Toro’s Hellboy movies don’t have that same influence. And so, all hopes for a Hellboy 3 fade, like the hopes for both Del Toro and Ron Perlman returning. 

But in Hollywood, an intellectual property with blockbuster prospect never dies. 2019 marks Hellboy’s return to the big screen, new in every way: a new director (Neil Marshall of The Descent (2005) and Doomsday (2008)’s fame), a new Hellboy (David Harbour of Stranger Things’ fame) and a new rating (a hard R-rating replacing the Del Toro movies’ squeaky clean PG-13 rating). It’s been greeted with both celebration (with hardcore Hellboy comic fans in particular) as well as condemnation (with the Del Toro’s movies fans in particular). It’s a fair criticism, since history suggests that sequels to a Del Toro movie that he’s not involved in are often critically and financially cursed. In cases of Blade Trinity (2004) and Pacific Rim Uprising (2018), they’re franchise-enders. That’s surely something 2019’s Hellboy, a potential franchise starter, would want to avoid.  

Unfortunately though, 2019’s Hellboy fails to dispel the Guillermo Del Toro curse. In other words, this movie is bad. Hellboy promises a tonally faithful adaptation of the Mignola comics, only to end up making people yearn for the old days of Del Toro’s unfaithful adaptations. 

As tone-deviants as the Del Toro movies were, at least the filmmaker was in full command of his creative vision. In this tone-accurate rendition though, it seems that Neil Marshall isn’t in full command of his creative vision. At the same time, rumors have suggested that Marshall was given little to no command of his creative vision, with the studio Lionsgate excluding him from the movie’s post-production process. Neither Marshall nor Lionsgate had confirmed whether such rumor was true or false, however, judging by the movie’s haphazard editing, it is most likely that the rumor is true. 

Neil Marshall should have been the ideal match for a hard-R, gorier take on the Hellboy lore. How it all went so horribly wrong boils down to the fact that the movie itself feels like a movie that’s directed by a studio, not Neil Marshall. Hellboy once again proves that no good movie ever comes out of studio interferences. If the movie had more trust with Neil Marshall’s vision, Hellboy would have had some semblance of artistic merit. Instead, in the hands of studio execs, this reboot just reeks of cash grab. 

As an R-rated movie, 2019’s Hellboy doesn’t quite understand the true essence of the rating. Like it or not, the movie is going to be judged heavily by that. With the addition of excessive violence and gore, it is going to be judged by how well those things are executed onscreen. 

Hellboy does have some fun bloody ideas. It takes things that people are familiar about fantasy-driven set-pieces and try turning them upside down, R-rated style. Here, taking down folkloric giant without any blood involved just wouldn’t fly anymore. This movie has all the necessary ingredients to please the hard-core splatter horror fans: decapitation, dismemberment, obviously crazy amounts of blood, you name it. At the same time, in a filmmaking sense, excessive violence and gore extend beyond just excessive violence and gore. They’re as much of a work of art as other parts of filmmaking. 

 

In this aspect, Hellboy falters. Its use of excessive violence and gore serves only as an excuse for its rather lame action. How can a movie make a giant being stabbed brutally through the neck with a tree trunk look so lame? Well, this movie can. It can boast all it wants in regards to its violence and gore, but all of that comes at the expense of visceral thrills. The actions just pass the audience by without making any strong impression, failing to either make one’s stomach churn in disgust or make one hoot in recognition of how awesome the kills were. The closest Hellboy can get in terms of visceral thrills is a feeling of tiredness as opposed to excitement. 

Furthermore, the editing doesn’t do Hellboy that much favor. In this day and age when action movies like the Raid and John Wick help set an example on how to properly edit action movies, Hellboy reverts to the 2000-era incomprehensible, over-stylized way of editing. Almost every action sequence here is an annoying compilation of rapid cutting, shaky cam and 300-style over-the-top, slow-fast motion editing. Yes, in these kinds of movies, style matters, but there’s got to be a limitation. What’s the use of style if it makes the movie unwatchable? 

If the movie had taken the hyperactive editing down by a few notches, Hellboy’s fight with Baba Yaga would have looked awesome. Again, it’s a cool idea. How is the idea of Hellboy fighting Baba Yaga, an old lady-like creature with crab legs, in a literally walking house sound not cool? Thankfully, the practical effect for the Baba Yaga creature is decent enough, but the editing doesn’t let the audience appreciate the movie’s tiniest bit of craft. The camera moves and cuts so frantically and furiously that it’s hard to comprehend what’s going on, who’s fighting who, which sums up a movie that thinks it’s cool, only to end up edging closer towards irritating. 

Still, even the best editors cannot do that much with a jumbled script in the first place. 2019’s Hellboy boldly attempts to adapt four Hellboy comic book issues and make them work as a cohesive whole. And yes, it feels like four distinct storylines coming together, but one thing’s missing: cohesion. Hellboy is one of those movies where plot points come together to beat each other up rather than hold hands. Lacking any comprehensible flow and well-earned build-up, the movie remains a bunch of disparate ideas that couldn’t get along. Because nothing about its beginning, middle and end connects, the movie doesn’t make sense at all. 

In the end, one must wonder: does 2019’s Hellboy even have a story or a script? Saying that this movie has a story is like saying that there is ice in hot tea. Andrew Crosby’s messy script doesn’t give a damn about the art of storytelling. It sets up so many characters arcs, so many stakes, yet spends very little to no time to make them matter. Hellboy noncommittally moves from one plot point to the other with the same attitude of a jumping flea, with the writer choosing to resolve certain plot point not because it’s been fully told, but rather because he’s bored with it. For a movie that tries to take Hellboy to newer direction, it is surprisingly confused about its own identity, unable to make up its mind whether to cover Hellboy’s untold story or just retell Del Toro’s Hellboy. It ends up achieving neither of its goals, barely scratching the surface with its fresh ideas while doing a poorer job in exploring the older ideas that were far better explored in Del Toro’s movies. 

For a start, 2019’s Hellboy could really make do without another Hellboy’s origin story. This is by no means saying that a superhero origins story retelling is a crime. Retelling a superhero origin story is fine as long as it has something new to say about it. 

What’s frustrating about 2019’s Hellboy is that it doesn’t really have anything new to say about Hellboy’s origin story. All the things 2019’s Hellboy try to say about Hellboy’s origin has already been said before in 2004’s Hellboy. His origin here plays out like how people remembered it back in 2004, with Grigori Rasputin unleashing his unlimited power to open up a multi-dimensional portal, while his cohorts Kroenen and Ilsa stand watch. No real difference to 2004’s Hellboy, right? If there are some twists, it can be as insignificant as the fact that it’s a bloodier reenactment of Hellboy’s origin story or as significantly damaging to the real heart of the Hellboy story as changing occult professor Trevor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane)’s mission in Germany from stopping Rasputin to killing Hellboy.  

Obviously, Bruttenholm didn’t kill Hellboy. And obviously, that’s just a minor change. But it’s a minor change that proves to be emotionally major in making Hellboy and Bruttenholm’s father-son relationship less compelling. 2019’s Hellboy tries giving the main father-son dynamic a unique spin. It trades away traditional sentimentality for modern-day snappiness. In this iteration, a father-son love is defined by two guys just bantering around, like a friend to another friend. 

Okay, that could be a good idea. A movie can really use a bit of bantering to build a deeper father-son relationship. But too much bantering can dull the emotional impact. Crosby’s script gets too carried away with the bantering that it ends up forgetting the beauty of a father-son relationship: its sincerity. Hellboy and Bruttenholm might constantly refer to each other as “dad” and “son”, but words mean nothing when the familial spark isn’t there. It doesn’t help that the couple doesn’t have as much screentime together in the movie, let alone some personal father-son moments. Still, save for their first encounter, Bruttenholm and Hellboy’s relationship plays out more like one between a boss and his employee than of a father and his son. 

But the stories don’t just end there. Hellboy tries to flesh out its supporting characters/ Hellboy’s colleagues Alice Monaghan and Ben Daimio so that they aren’t just faces with no personality. Yet the movie does have a funny way of interpreting character development. Hellboy does very little to give them depth or make them interesting. It asks questions about Alice’s and Daimio’s origins that no one really asks for. 

How did Hellboy and Alice first meet? Alice already explains that well enough in her encounter with Hellboy in an apartment. But in this movie, words aren’t enough.  So, the movie suddenly throws a random flashback sequence involving Hellboy’s fight with a changeling to visually explain how they first met that is time-wasting rather than enriching. Also, how did Daimio get his scars? Another flashback sequence comes, explaining how he got his scars that are just as time-wasting as Alice’s origins. 

And that comes at a cost of an underdeveloped villain. Nimue’s tragic origins and rise towards villainy could have been slightly interesting if the scriptwriter let her story breathe a little bit. But, since the movie has to have to more stories, and everything needs to be moving at a rapid pace, her story gets lost in the shuffle. Her character arc seems rushed, still needing a few extra parts to make her a far more realized character. A potential tragic villain instead ends up being just another generic evil witch who stands around and does nothing but spit out expositions. Even the movie’s way of showing that Nimue has a personal connection and motivation with Hellboy seems forced and strange. Lastly, since this is part-Hellboy, part-Arthurian mythology, Merlin pops up for a cameo appearance. But at that point, the movie has given up trying to tell a story.  

In Hellboy’s contest of chaos, a jumbled script is equally matched by its jumbled tone. Hellboy tries to make quippy humor and dark fantasy flow seamlessly, to which it couldn’t. And it’s the editing’s fault once more. Weird editing occurs throughout the movie, as one super dark scene with bombastic, end-of-the-world score shifts drastically and awkwardly to a light, relaxing scene with random rock band soundtrack. That aside, as a comedy separate from the fantasy element and vice versa, each fails to stand on its own. 

As a comedy, Hellboy tries way too hard to be Deadpool. Almost every character behaves like they’re in a Deadpool movie, throwing pop culture references and f-bombs every two or three minutes. But the difference between Deadpool and Hellboy is that Deadpool had funny jokes, while Hellboy has painfully unfunny jokes. The references strike more as lazy name-dropping rather than a topical jab. By the time Alice says that they need to beat Nimue so that she’s not gonna appear in the “sequel”, the novelty has worn off. 

As a fantasy, it fares much worst. It’s a genre that relies on breathtaking scope to capture the imagination, but in this movie, it’s clear that its ambition is let down by a constrained budget. With uninspired production design and special effects that range from serviceable to unconvincing, Hellboy is an ambitious project that’s criminally done on the cheap. The movie does try with the creature designs, but then there’s Ian McShane’s face pasted onto a CGI form that’s just the Mummy Returns-level bad. On the bright side, in a movie short of laughter, CGI Ian McShane provides its funniest moment. 

Already failing on its own as a comedy and fantasy, the movie goes further by misguidedly blending the two. Here comes the movie’s most absurd scene, which finds Nimue sitting in someone’s basement, watching TV (yes, even an ancient witch watches TV). It’s the typical evil witch speech scene, with a twist: instead of doomsday imageries, she’s watching a Jersey Shore-knockoff reality show, to which she uses her evil speech to comment on how the show reflects humanity’s inferiority. A villain with a sense of humor is welcome, but the villain’s humor here makes one scratch his head in confusion than laugh. 

Nimue died from dismemberment early on, didn’t she? Okay, so by the time the movie begins, she would have been dead for centuries, even millenniums. By the time she was brought back to life, she would only have been alive for hours or a few days, yet all of a sudden, she’s an expert on “reality shows” and “singing competitions”. It just so happens that the majority of the channels on that TV are reality shows, but really, Nimue doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s a woman with an ancient thought who doesn’t have the right or brains to comment on today’s pop culture. Also, what kind of villain gets inspired to do crime by watching a reality show? At least, in the beginning, the movie is trying to figure out what it is, but at this point, it has no clue what it is doing. 

Negative aside, David Harbour deserves an A for effort. He’s got a big shoe to fill in having to live up to Ron Perlman’s peerless portrayal of Hellboy from the previous two movies. Harbour’s interpretation still stands behind Perlman’s, but by a slight hair. His boundless energy and genuinely sleazy charisma provides Hellboy with its occasional burst of joy. He seems to relish every moment onscreen, comfortable with the movie’s self-aware, foul-mouthed universe. Ian McShane’s Professor Bruttenholm serves as Harbour’s equal match as far as joy goes. But the same cannot be said with the other cast members. Sasha Lane’s Alice Monaghan lacks the zip and conviction to maintain the novelty of being the movie’s reliable quip machine. American actor Daniel Dae Kim’s Ben Daimio contributes to the production with a British accent that comes and goes. Milla Jovovich’s Nimue is good and bad depending on one’s perspective. She is good on a campy and unintentionally hilarious standpoint, but incredibly bad on a threatening villain standpoint. 

CONCLUSION: 

Hellboy wastes David Harbour’s committed portrayal with a poorly-written, choppily-edited and just embarrassingly awful-looking movie so bereft of Guillermo Del Toro’s style, humor and imagination that goes to show that more blood doesn’t necessarily mean a better movie. 

Score: 3/10