Review - Hellboy (2019)
Right upfront, I've been having difficulties while writing this, in differentiating between Hellboy: the character and Hellboy: the movie so for the purpose of ease and light amusement, I'm going to refer to the character as Heck Chap because I don't care about this film at all anymore and I'm not sure anyone making it did either
Hellboy (2019) is the third live action Heck Chap film we've gotten this century and at this rate, it should probably be the last. I confess I haven't seen Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the film that preceded this, although I have seen the original of that particular iteration and I enjoy it quite a bit from what I remember. Those two films were clearly for pussies though as this Hellboy is violent and gory as hell (I promise I'll try and avoid that pun from here on), as well as unafraid to use naughty words. That should suggest a kind of badass swagger but it immediately starts on the wrong foot with the worst Arthurian legend prologue since Transformers 5 (God knows that's a low bar to hit your head on). We get a flashback with some Nazis in later but I'll skip over that and tell you that Hellboy is essentially just a film about a demon dude called Heck Chap who fights monsters and may or may not be the thing that will destroy the world, if he can't save it first. As far as stories go, it's cookie cutter but told impressively poorly. As I said, we get a couple of flashbacks chucked around with no consideration for pacing and characters who feel like they should be pretty important don't pop up until way too late. There's also a hilarious inter-textual insistence that there will be a sequel at some point, probably the funniest joke in the film, but so serious are they that the final shot of the film is a tease for a fan favourite Hellboy character (who also gives us one last jump scare). Actually, thinking about it, there were quite a lot of slightly meta touches like that. Drudging back through this trauma, the worst one must have been when Heck Chap makes a comment about how he likes his conflict low stakes but personal, something that seems to be a knowing nod towards how ludicrously, apocalyptically large the stakes in this film become. Except of course, that it is a throwaway comment that in no way excuses the events that follow. Adaptation can get away with that because we get to see screenwriters actually debate the conflict between different modes of storytelling, but with Hellboy, there is something so truly insulting about how we're just assumed to suck up the bland stakes because we got a slight wink to camera. God it makes me madder the longer I think about it so let's truck on.
While maybe one of the stronger bits of the film, the acting in Hellboy remains pretty poor all around. David Harbour is the titular Heck Chap and he certainly has the visual down I guess? I dunno, I don't think that can really be attributed to him. You put enough red makeup and horns on anyone big enough and they're going to look enough like Heck Chap. Harbour plays Heck Chap as if he's a 12 year old boy (the secret demographic for this film) and while it's inarguable that is a choice, it did nothing to endear the character to me. Playing opposite him as the villain is Mila Jovovich who, now being older than forty, is officially allowed to play witches and only witches in Hollywood films, as the ancient scriptures dictate. She kinda seems bored and despite having no interest in any role she's ever done, I did feel bad that she was wasting her time. Ian McShane also turns up to growl at the screen I guess? Again, he seemed bored but I did smile a little whenever I saw him because it reminded me of the John Wick 3 trailer that was shown before this and that's a great thing for me. Rounding out the cast are two Americans who play British characters and whose performances I just could not focus on because of how distressingly bad their accents were the whole time. One is Daniel Dae Kim who I've never seen in anything before and who I can only hope is better elsewhere, the other is Sasha Lane. It breaks my heart to say her performance is bad because last year, she gave two performances that absolutely stole my heart, one in Hearts Beat Loud, the other in The Miseducation of Cameron Post. After the work she does here, I'm going to have to bump her debut in American Honey sooner up my watch list to remind myself why I think she's a great actress.
To save myself from insanity, I'd like to take a minute to introduce you to what is now, very suddenly, one of my most anticipated films of the year. It is called VelociPastor and, in the same way that Hellboy is about a man who is part Hell, part Boy, is about a priest who can also turn into a Velociraptor to fight ninjas. There's a high chance it's some kind of cross between Sharknado and The Love Witch in how it aims to seem of a certain budget and certain era (respectively, because that is sadly not the name of one film) but even so, I'd be lying if I said that the trailer doesn't fill me with elation in the same way that Hobbs and Shaw does. It looks a joy, can't wait to see it and I'm going to leave the trailer here because I'd frankly rather be talking about it than Hellboy but I simply don't know enough yet. Until then, enjoy this aperitif: https://youtu.be/7yAjPUhIkdo
One final slog through Hellboy then, which leaves us at the unfortunate business of talking about the CGI. CGI is a tricky thing to discuss and often poorly discussed by film fans. Almost certainly, there will have been a huge chunk of Hellboy which used CGI to enhance backgrounds, actors performances or other minute things, done so well by a team of very hard working CGI artists that they achieve their aim of being unnoticeable. To those teams, I say congratulations because that kind of work is exceptionally thankless and usually done relatively well. Unfortunately, not all of the CGI was well handled, to the scale that I often felt like I was watching a cutscene from a rushed PS2 game (for the uninitiated, that is a great thing in 1999, a bad thing in 2019). One sequence where a binch of giants are batting Heck Chap about had me leaning back and closing my eyes for a little while because it was all getting a little too much for me. No solace was to be found as the two hour computer crash of a film slogged further on, leading through many action scenes whose only moments of interest were "Huh, that is some fairly full on CGI gore", before getting distracted again by how awful the helicopters, breath or monsters look. No, I take back that last point a little. Some of the creature designs are fairly cool really. I've never read the Hellboy comics so I don't know if they're all lifted wholesale from there but they move away from the so often anthropomorphised creature designs that much of fantasy gravitates towards. That said, they're not rendered all that well and I never beleived for a single second that I was actually watching monsters terrorise London.
Okay, we're out the other side now. Hellboy is really bad. I hope that's gotten across. As I write this, it's late on Monday evening (more like Tuesday morning honestly) and a combination of sleep deprivation and having seen Hellboy are draining me. In a way though, there was a slight worthiness to seeing it because now, I have a strong leader for worst film of 2019. So great job Heck Chap and team, you get a lovely little score of a
Hellboy (2019) is the third live action Heck Chap film we've gotten this century and at this rate, it should probably be the last. I confess I haven't seen Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the film that preceded this, although I have seen the original of that particular iteration and I enjoy it quite a bit from what I remember. Those two films were clearly for pussies though as this Hellboy is violent and gory as hell (I promise I'll try and avoid that pun from here on), as well as unafraid to use naughty words. That should suggest a kind of badass swagger but it immediately starts on the wrong foot with the worst Arthurian legend prologue since Transformers 5 (God knows that's a low bar to hit your head on). We get a flashback with some Nazis in later but I'll skip over that and tell you that Hellboy is essentially just a film about a demon dude called Heck Chap who fights monsters and may or may not be the thing that will destroy the world, if he can't save it first. As far as stories go, it's cookie cutter but told impressively poorly. As I said, we get a couple of flashbacks chucked around with no consideration for pacing and characters who feel like they should be pretty important don't pop up until way too late. There's also a hilarious inter-textual insistence that there will be a sequel at some point, probably the funniest joke in the film, but so serious are they that the final shot of the film is a tease for a fan favourite Hellboy character (who also gives us one last jump scare). Actually, thinking about it, there were quite a lot of slightly meta touches like that. Drudging back through this trauma, the worst one must have been when Heck Chap makes a comment about how he likes his conflict low stakes but personal, something that seems to be a knowing nod towards how ludicrously, apocalyptically large the stakes in this film become. Except of course, that it is a throwaway comment that in no way excuses the events that follow. Adaptation can get away with that because we get to see screenwriters actually debate the conflict between different modes of storytelling, but with Hellboy, there is something so truly insulting about how we're just assumed to suck up the bland stakes because we got a slight wink to camera. God it makes me madder the longer I think about it so let's truck on.
While maybe one of the stronger bits of the film, the acting in Hellboy remains pretty poor all around. David Harbour is the titular Heck Chap and he certainly has the visual down I guess? I dunno, I don't think that can really be attributed to him. You put enough red makeup and horns on anyone big enough and they're going to look enough like Heck Chap. Harbour plays Heck Chap as if he's a 12 year old boy (the secret demographic for this film) and while it's inarguable that is a choice, it did nothing to endear the character to me. Playing opposite him as the villain is Mila Jovovich who, now being older than forty, is officially allowed to play witches and only witches in Hollywood films, as the ancient scriptures dictate. She kinda seems bored and despite having no interest in any role she's ever done, I did feel bad that she was wasting her time. Ian McShane also turns up to growl at the screen I guess? Again, he seemed bored but I did smile a little whenever I saw him because it reminded me of the John Wick 3 trailer that was shown before this and that's a great thing for me. Rounding out the cast are two Americans who play British characters and whose performances I just could not focus on because of how distressingly bad their accents were the whole time. One is Daniel Dae Kim who I've never seen in anything before and who I can only hope is better elsewhere, the other is Sasha Lane. It breaks my heart to say her performance is bad because last year, she gave two performances that absolutely stole my heart, one in Hearts Beat Loud, the other in The Miseducation of Cameron Post. After the work she does here, I'm going to have to bump her debut in American Honey sooner up my watch list to remind myself why I think she's a great actress.
To save myself from insanity, I'd like to take a minute to introduce you to what is now, very suddenly, one of my most anticipated films of the year. It is called VelociPastor and, in the same way that Hellboy is about a man who is part Hell, part Boy, is about a priest who can also turn into a Velociraptor to fight ninjas. There's a high chance it's some kind of cross between Sharknado and The Love Witch in how it aims to seem of a certain budget and certain era (respectively, because that is sadly not the name of one film) but even so, I'd be lying if I said that the trailer doesn't fill me with elation in the same way that Hobbs and Shaw does. It looks a joy, can't wait to see it and I'm going to leave the trailer here because I'd frankly rather be talking about it than Hellboy but I simply don't know enough yet. Until then, enjoy this aperitif: https://youtu.be/7yAjPUhIkdo
One final slog through Hellboy then, which leaves us at the unfortunate business of talking about the CGI. CGI is a tricky thing to discuss and often poorly discussed by film fans. Almost certainly, there will have been a huge chunk of Hellboy which used CGI to enhance backgrounds, actors performances or other minute things, done so well by a team of very hard working CGI artists that they achieve their aim of being unnoticeable. To those teams, I say congratulations because that kind of work is exceptionally thankless and usually done relatively well. Unfortunately, not all of the CGI was well handled, to the scale that I often felt like I was watching a cutscene from a rushed PS2 game (for the uninitiated, that is a great thing in 1999, a bad thing in 2019). One sequence where a binch of giants are batting Heck Chap about had me leaning back and closing my eyes for a little while because it was all getting a little too much for me. No solace was to be found as the two hour computer crash of a film slogged further on, leading through many action scenes whose only moments of interest were "Huh, that is some fairly full on CGI gore", before getting distracted again by how awful the helicopters, breath or monsters look. No, I take back that last point a little. Some of the creature designs are fairly cool really. I've never read the Hellboy comics so I don't know if they're all lifted wholesale from there but they move away from the so often anthropomorphised creature designs that much of fantasy gravitates towards. That said, they're not rendered all that well and I never beleived for a single second that I was actually watching monsters terrorise London.
Okay, we're out the other side now. Hellboy is really bad. I hope that's gotten across. As I write this, it's late on Monday evening (more like Tuesday morning honestly) and a combination of sleep deprivation and having seen Hellboy are draining me. In a way though, there was a slight worthiness to seeing it because now, I have a strong leader for worst film of 2019. So great job Heck Chap and team, you get a lovely little score of a
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