So there’s a new Hellboy movie out this weekend that is not a sequel to the previous two films but is also not quite a full reboot or remake. Guillermo Del Toro’s first two Hellboy movies were never never my favorite films and I have no comic book affinity for the character. But I was kind of hoping this new flick would be good…. but no, it really wasn’t.
So the new Hellboy movie kind of is a reboot but also kind of assumes you know a lot about the Hellboy mythology. It jumps right in, not explaining who or what a Hellboy is… but then it gets scared and gives us the backstory. And backstory is something this movie loves to tell… except in the large number of cases where it does not. Did I mention this movie is a confusing, scatterbrained, massively and messily edited, nigh on hysterical mess? It is. Oh boy, it is.
Basic story is that Hellboy – a demonic good guy superhero summoned by Nazis but rescues by British Special Forces – is working as a top secret (? but not really ?) monster hunter. An ancient witch who King Arthur (!!) dispatched in the 5th century is getting ready to return so Hellboy has to stop her. Not a deep plot there… and yet weirdly convoluted.
Hellboy feels like a bunch of movies were tossed into a blender. It has the editing consistency of Batman v. Superman, the hand-waving weird world-building of Constantine, the feeling you walked into a sequel that never had a part 1 just like in the terrible movie Ultraviolet, and the basic story of The Kid Who Would Be King (somehow).
The editing isn’t quite as bad as Batman v. Superman in that it holds together a bit better… but often it feels jagged and confusing as though there was a much longer film lost on the cutting room floor. The weird world-building… man, this movie really assumes you’re steeped in the lore of Hellboy. Or maybe they think seeing the previous two pretty much unrelated films was good enough. But, no, not even that… we’re often introduced to new, crazy characters who I guess we’re supposed to be familiar with but aren’t.
All of this is kind of cool in that the movie just tosses you in the deep end and you have to go with their crazy imagination. And it is quite imaginative… I give the movie credit for committing to this lunacy unapologetically. Doesn’t always make a consistent or particularly rational film though.
Action-wise… the movie is just ok. There’s some inventive ideas and creature designs but the actual fight scenes are pretty unimpressive and rough. That is, until the code – the Six Months Later title card displays and we see an unrelated action scene that’s weirdly cool given how tepid the rest of the movie was. I don’t get why that non-story-related sequence was so much better. But there ya go.
So this movie is a big giant well-intentioned but horribly edited mess. I can’t recommend it… though I can somewhat admire it for laying all its cards on the table. It surely has an imagination and original ideas… but that’s not enough to make a movie actually work as a movie.
Score: 68