REVIEW: Let me preface this review by admitting that ever since it was announced, I was wary of Millennium’s new, R-rated reboot of the HELLBOY saga. I just never understood why, if they are as willing as they always said they were, the studio wouldn’t allow Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman the opportunity to finish the trilogy they so beautifully set up in the last two HELLBOY’s in favor of a reboot where one was never really needed. I get that the idea was to relaunch the franchise for a new generation, but the early trailers make it look like little more than a schlocky B-programmer. That said, I went into this with as open a mind as I could muster, as I genuinely like David Harbour as an actor, and also have enjoyed much of director Neil Marshall’s work in the past, specifically his excellent directing on “Game of Thrones”, as well as the anarchic fun of DOOMSDAY and CENTURION. Surely this had to at least be ok?
To my horror, this HELLBOY reboot goes disastrously awry right from the start. If ever a movie felt like a case of too many cooks and reversed engineered to be “edgy”, this is it. It starts with a stylized b&w prologue juiced up with a dash of color that would have been provocative had it come out in the early 2000s, but is hopelessly derivative of the clichés spawned by SIN CITY and 300, which themselves went out of style long ago. Initially, I was able to write this off thinking, “oh well, things have to get better once Hellboy enters the picture, right?”
Nope.
To give David Harbour some credit, he tries really hard to rise to the occasion. You can tell he threw himself into the role, even trying to distinguish his performance by Perlman’s by leaning into the tortured adolescent aspect of the character, but he has nothing to work with. The film is extremely episodic, with it almost feeling like four episodes of a show like “Ash vs Evil Dead” stitched together to feature length, with set pieces awkwardly leading into each other. At the ninety minute point, I was all but sure the film was about the end as it seemed we were in the middle of a climax, but instead the movie had another thirty minutes to go where virtually nothing happened to move the plot forward except tread water and make it longer.
The action is relatively unimpressive, with the significantly lower-budget than the originals painfully evident in the archaic CGI used in the battle scenes. Even worse is a moment where Marshall’s film re-stages a moment from del Toro’s original, the Nazi-G.I. standoff with Grigori Rasputin that leads to Hellboy’s birth, which lacks any of the style and flair that distinguished the same scene back in 2004.
Basically, this new version of HELLBOY plays out exactly like the schlocky genre B-movies we used to get in the Screen Gems era and is very much in the same vein as Millennium’s own misbegotten CONAN THE BARBARIAN reboot. If your enjoyment of the del Toro originals was marred by desperation for more blood and f-bombs, you might get a little more out of this than most. Even by that barometer, this is a pretty disastrous reboot and as bad as something like last fall’s ROBIN HOOD. Beware.