“Hellboy” (2019) inadvertently teaches a lesson about the way we perceive modern cinema. The CGI creatures and landscapes in director Neil Marshall’s film are technically creative and visually convincing, yet they are only impressive as individual moments; they don’t improve the overall film. Maybe it’s not a universal truism, but in this case, the movie is hurt by telling so much of its story via CGI – even though all of the CGI is very good.
Big shoes to fill
This third “Hellboy” film – which I’ll call “Hellboy19” – is also hampered out of the gate by the fact that it follows Guillermo del Toro’s widely admired “Hellboy” (2004) and “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (2008). Those films – derived from Mike Mignola’s Dark Horse comics — are also notable for their artistry, and the performance by Ron Perlman is not much different from what David Harbour delivers here. Yet del Toro’s films are more lovable.
It’s largely because those films came first. For this reboot, writer Andrew Cosby is tasked with crafting a screenplay that 1, tells Hellboy’s backstory for newcomers, 2, tells a fresh yarn, and 3, makes a case that this film needs to exist.
“Hellboy” (2019)
Director: Neil Marshall
Writers: Andrew Cosby, Mike Mignola
Stars: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane
“Hellboy19” doesn’t wildly miss the mark, but it doesn’t quite connect. The trio of Hellboy, Alice (Sasha Lane, “American Honey”) and British Army man Ben (Daniel Dae Kim, looking the same as he did decades ago on “Angel” and “Lost”) make a decent heroic trio – but not as good as Hellboy, Liz and Abe Sapien. Harbour is quite good in the title role, but on the other hand, he’s riffing on Perlman’s already perfect turn.
The story is more confusing than it needs to be, particularly its multiple origin stories. In one, Hellboy comes through a dimensional rift as a baby during the time of the Nazis. This is the same as in 2004’s “Hellboy.”
Later, things get confusing. We learn Hellboy is actually something like five centuries old, the child of a demon father and a human mother who is descended from King Arthur. Perhaps I missed the reconciliation between these two conflicting origins. My mind wandered during the CGI battles.
Cool and creative stuff
It’s the fault of how I perceived the movie, not the fault of the CGI artists. Technically, there’s a lot of cool and creative stuff here. Hellboy dispatches a trio of giants. Alice can serve as a conduit to the beyond by touching a corpse; then she barfs up the person’s speaking visage in a cloud of vapor. We see a house with legs, a manifestation of Baba Yaga, who herself is an evocatively gross creature who gets around via “Exorcist”-style crab-walk.
A pig creature – the hench-beast of the resurrected Blood Queen (Mila Jovovich) — regularly interacts with other characters, and I had no problem believing it. The list of top-shelf CGI goes on.
But in service to what? Cosby aims for father-son conflict to ground the bloated conflict between the Blood Queen and the good guys of the BPRD. Hellboy, whose quips connect about 50 percent of the time (a lower percentage than in the Perlman films), is mad at his adoptive father Professor Broom (Ian McShane) for reasons that only make sense in the abstract.
Belated questions
Broom, who ages slowly thanks to magic, didn’t tell Hellboy about his origin; plus, he raised him to fight demons, when Hellboy is himself a demon. But why are these issues cropping up now, when Hellboy is at least 80 years old? Shouldn’t these questions have been raised and reconciled around the middle of the last century?
The stuff with King Arthur and Hellboy’s prophesied destiny is mildly engaging. But Hellboy’s conflict over whether to fight the Blood Queen or claim the Excalibur sword and team up with her is both clichéd and unbelievable. Maybe it’s his “destiny” to join the Blood Queen, but we don’t believe for a split-second that he’ll choose her, because we know how these stories go.
There’s a lot to like here for people who revel in good CG effects or who work in that field and enjoy fine examples of the work. This movie is not embarrassingly bad. It’s merely mediocre and overly showy, but that’s distressing after the first two movies. People who are into the Hellboy mythology after the comics and del Toro’s films will likely feel like “Hellboy19” doesn’t add much of value to the saga.