Hellboy

Harbour’s good, with all the right catchphrases. The gigantic outcasts from hell in the climax might be the most impressive ever. The casting of Milla Jovovich appropriately defines the target audience composed of fans of bloody, B-level monster freak-shows. Neil Marshall’s imagination knows no bounds, nor does his courage (or lack of common sense?) to flush such a huge budget down the drain. His Hellboy amuses with its stupidity, excess and craziness, but watching it in a cinema seemed extremely out of place, even bizarre. With the right crew at home, beer and popcorn, I might be inclined to give it three stars. (17.04.2019)

In some aspects, Hellboy has pretty decent balls. Unfortunately, not even the exploited to the marrow R-rating and the good jokes here and there can alter the fact that it looks uglier than shit. Really, it’s been a long time since I last saw an audiovisual work that looked so terribly unaesthetic. An awful, overelaborated digital mess; the cancer of modern filmmaking and, in this case, in the terminal stage. (11.04.2019)

The new Hellboy goes uncompromisingly its own way, and the question is, will you like it? Fans of the comics will find a lot of familiar things and maybe they will be willing to forgive Hellboy for moving forward at too high a speed, for the way it neglects character work and for taking a step backwards in terms of filmmaking compared to what Ron Perlman and Guillermo del Toro did years ago. But if you haven’t read Mike Mignola's comics, you're probably better off waiting for Avengers. This Hellboy doesn't have much to offer. (11.04.2019)

The new Hellboy flopped at the box office and with critics, and I'm not too happy either. Neil Marshall may have made the solid The Descent and the perfect post-apocalyptic B-movie Doomsday, but Hellboy won't rank among the highlights of his career. There's no story, which is to be expected, but the weird nonsensical jumping from scene to scene felt annoying to the point of artificiality. David Harbour isn't downright bad, but the humour is so dry that I didn't laugh once, which I take as a huge minus. When it comes to the action, it's pretty good to watch, it's very substantial in terms of gore – I can't remember the last time I saw such carnage in the cinema – but it's a great shame things usually end up when they are at their best. Praise should be given to the scene with the giants (which could have been longer), Baba Yaga who had eerily perfect make up, and the finale, which is again too short and doesn't live up to its full potential. It's a shame that outside of the action, the film is rather boring and has nothing to surprise and impress. Thanks to the decent serving of gore and a fair amount of monsters of all kinds, the film is watchable, but I was expecting a more entertaining ride. 60% (14.04.2019)

Though it stays closer to the source material, it is still not a good adaptation. It does not automatically create a film for fans when you combine multiple plotlines from multiple comic books, and I would give anything to have seen Guillermo del Toro's planned conclusion to the trilogy instead of this cluttered outcome. Even though Daniel Dae Kim is appropriately cast as Hellboy in this world of blood, betrayal, and endless fighting, excessive cheesiness or intentional B-movie qualities are not an advantage in this case, but instead a painful burden. From the very beginning, the screenplay relies on necessary shortcuts, thus undermining itself right from the start when it launches three storylines simultaneously and fails to completely extricate itself from this unfavorable starting position until the end. It is a shame about the strangely artificial masks and occasionally bizarre special effects, which often border on the ridiculous. And last but not least, there is the disgraceful and increasingly common posture of using not only blood but also profanity at any cost to achieve a stricter rating. In the second half, it became so childish that I almost grimaced, even though I am always in favor of boldly subverting an overly tense atmosphere. I feel sad about the resulting dead end, as Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen could and should have been an example of how to navigate the path of slightly smaller adaptations of famous comics, instead of closing the door on many potential wonders. (07.07.2019)

I preferred Del Toro’s vision much more. Although this Hellboy tries to draw more on the comic books, it’s bloodier and ruder, but I miss the fantastic poetry here. Here they simply squander the mass monsters and characters appearing here, only to flit by on the screen, leaving you none the wiser. Harbour’s Hellboy is much more hideous, like a heavy-metal street bum, crossed with the devil. The action is hard and dirty, but full of playfulness and invention. The monsters are really demonic. The witch is so horrible that the sight of her made me feel physically ill. But my two-year-old daughter liked it... (31.10.2021)

Once upon a time... but it wasn't a fairy tale. The new Hellboy is interesting in many individual ways, pleasingly literal for readers of Mignola's comics, but unfortunately, it doesn't work as a whole. The previous films are still great and the cartoons are even better. (13.04.2019)

My fears were confirmed, this is not at all the Hellboy I wanted to see. I know, maybe they couldn't even manage to cram the bulk of Mignola's years of universe building into a two-hour film that is also not a sequel and has to introduce Hellboy and the team. Someone has tried, and it was a suicide attempt – cheap, unimaginative, overstuffed, and at times (as the trailers warned) almost TV boring and awkward looking. It's similar to the comics in plot, but hardly at all in mood. The film seems to try to mask its lack of atmosphere with gore and all sorts of fucking, but it doesn't even manage to do that properly, and I wasn't particularly curious about anything like that. Hellboy is supposed to be poetic, doom-laden, dramatic, horrific, and yet still entertaining (like the books, like Del Toro's vision), especially since the filmmakers chose The Wild Hunt and The Storm and the Fury as their templates; yet this reboot is none of those things. It can only look up to Del Toro's magical films (and sometimes seems to) because it's worse in every way... Production design? Ridiculously simple. Potentially interesting or entertaining characters? Laughable (poor Lobster). Perhaps everything and everyone lacks heart, and unfortunately that includes Hellboy himself. David Harbour may be a likable actor who won me over in Stranger Things, but he wears a much worse mask than Ron Perlman, and underneath it he overacts, hollers, and prances unnecessarily. Why? If Mike Mignola likes it that way, that's his business. I, however, will continue to prefer to read his books and watch Del Toro's movies, in which Hellboy is Hellboy and which, while they follow their own path, at least have clarity and are not so damn stupid.___P.S. The misery was quite enhanced by the "cool at all costs" Czech subtitles, which sometimes were not even translations but completely made up (probably for dubbing purposes). (11.04.2019)

As usual, I have to express my sincere admiration for Marshall’s visual drive and for the courage to go his own way, but the script of his Hellboy is so weak and chaotic that I can’t praise the film as a whole (and I rooted for it despite the poor marketing and the awful responses). The fast editing and the multiple storylines set the tremendous dynamics of the narration, but also reinforce the episodic nature and messiness of a plot that lacks any strong milestones and arrives at important twists pretty much by chance. It’s quite watchable, though, Harbour is alright, Milla looks almost surprisingly good with a cleavage and some scenes deliver a bit of high-speed guilty pleasure, but the film as a whole doesn’t resonate, is unable to connect the viewer to the story, and the R-rating often feels awfully childish and gratuitous. Maybe in the future I will appreciate it more, but for the time being, what prevails is want and greyness. 50% (24.04.2019)

Having a 50 million-dollar full-length feature written by a debutant screenwriter with no experience in feature-lenght films, and assuming that it will then "somehow" work under the direction of a slasher B-movie director from England, is a really ignorant overestimation. It is therefore fair for the producers that the movie flopped. Although it seems there must have been a serious endeavor to please the comic book’s fans, Cosby's screenplay for this two-hour-long movie just does not work at all, and it appears to be an overpriced and incoherent dud, where the shallow characters have no chemistry between them, and so we cannot feel any sort of emotions from them. Also, their motivations are either completely shallow or straight up just completely random. Hellboy comes across like a computer game, where you are constantly jumping from one location to another, finding a key that will move you on to the next level, in a superficial (and seemingly unnecessary) plot. With all that being said, this movie is a really disgustingly big pile of CGI excrement. However, when I put aside even the most basic expectations I have from any movie (in other words, I switch off my brain), I absolutely did not enjoy this in any way. Actually, after those two hours, I could not figure out how this appalling failure of a movie was supposed to hold my attention. (17.09.2019)

Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy was more fairytale-like (but still pretty creepy), both films had amazing production design, make-up effects and a distinctive creative imagination. Neil Marshall's vision relies heavily on gory visuals, is more brash and doesn't shy from swear words, in short, it's an R-rated film with all the trimmings, which in the end has its pros and cons. I was unfortunately not as amused by David Harbour's banter as I was by Ron Perlman’s, in fact I had somewhat of a problem sympathising with any of the characters as they all more or less got on my nerves. Besides, the connection with the Arthurian legend left me with rather mixed impressions. But not to cast aspersions, of the characters, I was most interested (i.e. least irritated) by the witch Nimue and liked the excursion to Baba Yaga's cottage on chicken legs. I'm sorry to see how the latest Hellboy movie turned out, because the potential here was great. I wanted to criticise the film for its mostly distracting visuals and not-so-nice visual effects, but given the $50 million budget, that's understandable. But still, what a shame! (22.04.2019)