Film Review - Hellboy (2019)

Hellboy is a reboot of the graphic novel character that had 2 previous movies directed by Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman as Hellboy, this time Neil Marshall from the Descent and Game of Thrones takes the directors chair and David Harbour is Hellboy this time, the story concerns an evil witch (Milla Jovovich) who is buried in Ancient England but not before vowing revenge and later being dug up in modern day London and so Hellboy has to go and stop her and also find out his true destiny.

This new Hellboy is rated R18+ here in Australia for a reason as this movie is very bloody, gory and violent and I personally loved every single moment of it, every flow of blood, dismembered body parts and disembowling of opponents I just ate it up and even licked my lips a couple of times as it was so refreshing to see this amount of violence and blood in a major movie and it is something I have missed in a movie like this where all too often the violence is heavily toned down.

Unfortunately the movies storytelling is not as satisfying as it is in terms of its tone all over the place, on the one hand you have this R rated violence, a story concerning mythical England and then almost out of nowhere these rock video style action sequences pop into the film as if they were inserted into the editing room during post production plus there are a lot of one liners on show here as well and the two styles didn’t really mix that well for me and there has been stories about fights during the making of the film and I’m not surprised as the mismash of tones is really on show here.

As for the performances, Mr Harbour and Ian McShane do what they can in their roles but a lot of the time it seems like they don’t really have any meaningful character arcs or consistent direction to guide their character and performances while Ms Jovovich is okay as the Witch but also not that memorable either.

And so that was Hellboy and I enjoyed its violence but I wish it didn’t feel so tonally inconsistent, 2 out of 5.