Hellboy

Starring: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, Daniel Dae Kim, Sophie Okonedo

Director: Neil Marshall

I waited a bit before writing this review. Not quite sure what to write I decided to hold off and just keep thinking. It ended up being a wise decision as I saw an Instagram post from Mila Jovovich (who plays the Blood Queen Nimue in the film) that helped to contextualize it in a bit of a different way.

If you have been out in the world at all I’m sure that you’ve seen the critical reception to Hellboy. Needless to say it is not stellar and currently sits at about a 14% or so on Rotten Tomatoes. I must admit that walking out of the theater I wasn’t sure what to think. I am a huge Guillermo Del Toro fan and my love of his work started with Hellboy. Hellboy, due to its excellent craft and the time in my life when I saw it, was the first time I noticed the filmmaking behind films. The use of color, the incredible sets and the practical creatures overloaded my young brain. I was in, so in that I still attribute my decision to move to LA and try to make entertainment to Hellboy. So obviously anything less than that kind of revelatory experience was going to cause some dissonance for me.

I was ready to call this movie a bit of a mess (which it is) and write it off as a missed opportunity whose production troubles lead to a movie more interested in getting sequels than being its own thing, but then I saw what Jovovich had to say. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is that the biggest hits of her career are the ones that have gained a cult status after being eviscerated by critics. That includes The Fifth Element and the glorious awesomeness that is the Resident Evil film series. That’s right, the beloved Fifth Element (which she is incredible in) was initially not very well praised by reviewers.

That statement brings up the age old questions of what quality in a movie really is. Whose standards do we conform to when talking seriously about movies? Why is Jovovich always so awesome and the best part of anything she is in? The answer to that second one is because she is a woefully underrated actress. The first is a little more complicated and has led me to continue thinking about Hellboy on those terms. Is it the best movie ever made? NOPE. Does it have massive flaws? Absolutely. Are most of those flaws most likely due to a lot of documented noodling from differing parties during production? Indubitably. Would it work if you threw it on Netflix one afternoon with no other expectations than some gory monster action? Probably. Luckily I waited so long to get my opinion out there that you might get that chance sooner rather than later.

Hellboy is a pretty hard movie to summarize. The plot seems to fire in many different directions; rapidly building a world that could potentially sprout spinoffs and sequels from here to eternity. The main plot involves Hellboy (David Harbour) trying to stop Nimue the blood queen before she is able to be fully resurrected and bring about the apocalypse. On the way there are battles with trolls, secret societies, daddy issues, and teaming up with Daniel Dae Kim and Sasha Lane to kick some creature rear ends in a manner less meticulous and Del Toro-y but far more gory.

It’s a mess, and most of that stems from a wish to give the fans everything they could possibly want (including Lobster Johnson who is featured briefly but played by a wonderfully cast Thomas Hayden Church). Most reviews so far have focused on what doesn’t work in Hellboy. I figure we should focus on the things that do work about it.

Hellboy has a lot of cool stuff in it. Multiple movies worth of cool stuff. For example, there is a fight with a vampire inside a wrestling ring in Mexico, which is a glorious thing to get to type. Hellboy fights three trolls; a sequence filmed as an extremely gory, digitally stitched single take that is a lot of fun to watch.

Then Baba Yaga shows up. No, not John Wick, that would make this the greatest piece of cinema ever made. This Baba Yaga is a grotesque Russian witch who lives in an alternate dimension in a big old spooky house that walks around on massive bird legs. Everything about her is AWESOME. She is a mostly practical effect, she is scary, her serious creepiness plays excellently off Hellboy’s sarcasm, and she moves around like Linda Blair crab walking in The Exorcist. Once again, AWESOME! She doesn’t amount to much but I was sufficiently wowed. Oh and speaking of wows, there is a pig beast thing called a Graugach who is a mix of cgi and practical work that I very much enjoyed. Things like this poke their heads up occasionally and really start to make watching worth it.

I must also give kudos to Hellboy for assembling a really cool cast and director choice. It was going to be hard to replace Ron Perlman and John Hurt as Hellboy and his father Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm. Luckily they didn’t try to replace them and instead took a different approach. Rather than the lovesick, smartass Hellboy who wishes he didn’t have to stay hidden and his kind father who spouts words of beautiful wisdom and mythological information, we get David Harbour and Ian McShane. Harbour’s Hellboy is still a smartass, but he is not hidden and not looking for love. McShane plays Broom in the delicious way that McShane plays so many of his characters. He is meaner and rougher, but still holds onto the kindness and care of a father. Their relationship is a bit more contentious, but it still works (even if I wish the movie spent FAR more time on it).

Aside from them, Hellboy’s team is filled out by Daniel Dae Kim’s Major Ben Daimio, a British paranormal agent, and Sasha Lane’s Alice who has the ability to speak to the dead (and a few other tricks). Both do a good job (Lane’s questionable accent not withstanding) and are fun to watch as is the aforementioned Pig monster voiced by the underrated Stephen Graham.

So the movie isn’t ALL bad. I’m going to give it a C+, but not as a write off. The grade is given in the hopes that you will give this movie a chance, but come at it expecting something entertaining and crazy and not some Oscar aiming project. Put this project along the work of Paul W.S. Anderson, Last Witch Hunter, and Shane Black’s The Predator. Movies that aren’t considered good on the normal scale but to the right people (me) are incredibly entertaining. Hellboy isn’t quite there for me yet, but I think it is slowly growing.

Grade: C+