This was a different kind of Hellboy movie. I’ll say right now it’s not a great movie, nor does it hold a candle to Del Toro’s, but surrendering to that fact and just looking for a good time I found some things I really enjoyed about this one.
#spoilers
Prior to seeing the movie I learned of the production hell it went through, how the director butt heads with the producers and there was all sorts of drama. In short, two kinds of movies were trying to be made, and it’s pretty clear as you watch it unfold. What’s actually impressive is that it comes out as something fairly coherent, but it certainly would’ve been better if they’d just stuck with one concept.
The two concepts are:
A. Hard R-Rated Horror Bash
B. More of that Hollywood Hellboy Del Toro crafted so well.
There’s an overload of humor on Hellboy’s part, a lot of it looking like ADR tack-ons which is worse, and the editing is just atrocious. I mean… it’s so bad. They literally do not take a break to breathe or make you think. It really gets bad in the last act when Merlin enters the show.
Yeah, I said Merlin. One of the good things about this movie that I’ll give it is that there is a plethora of characters, plots, monsters and more that really brings home the world in which Hellboy and the BPRD inhabit. The movie suffers from it, it does, but in terms of Youtube fodder this movie would be great to just look up standalone clips. You wanna see Hellboy fight a Lucha-Vampire? Giants? Baba Yaga? A weird, warthog, changeling thing? You name it they got it. Walking away it made me think that a BPRD Anthology movie would be pretty interesting, but we’ll less than likely ever see the sort.
I also really liked the way BPRD was presented in this movie, as well as Ian McShane’s Dr. Broom. His hard-ass personality mixed with his genuine charm very nearly stole the show. I was also impressed by McShane and David Harbor’s chemistry. They barely scratch the surface, but for what we got there’s a lot of potential.
The thought of relating the entire plot sounds exhausting, because at it’s core we’ve got the Blood Queen coming back from the dead looking to raise a plague on Earth and bring out the devil in Hellboy. That’s it. If you’ve seen any other Hellboy movie, as well as the trailers, you can kind of predict how it’s gonna go. The mish-mash of different plots just turns it into a big Hollywood barf bag thrown on the big screen.
As I said, if you broke this movie up into snippets/shorts, you’ve got a lot of good stuff, but as whole it’s a little brutal. If they’d cut down on a few of the monster threads and the humor and went more for the sheer dark horror, this movie could’ve been great, but as it stands it isn’t. If you’re looking for more of what came before, I’d steer away, but if you like Hellboy and are curious enough, give it a view and have your own opinion.
TL;DR Score: It’s like… the movie is a little baby Hellboy, and the Producers are just force feeding whatever pages of the old comics they can find down its throat.
TL;DR Comics 