Summary
The only thing more abundant than the bloodletting are the plot points, but that doesn’t stop the Hellboy from being genuinely insane fun.
The boisterous readaptation of Mike Mignola’s HELLBOY opens with the eponymous hero fighting a luchador vampire in Tijuana, impaling him on the ring’s barrier to strains of “Rock You Like a Hurricane” in Spanish. It only gets (delightfully) weirder from there.
While not a continuation of Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 and 2008 films, Andrew Cosby’s screenplay picks up in media res. After a brief prelude in which King Arthur dismembers Nimue the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich) and scatters her remains around Britain, we flash forward to the present day where Hellboy (David Harbour) has been working for the B.P.R.D. in America for some time. His adoptive father, Trevor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane) sends him the UK to liaise with Osiris Club. Hellboy is betrayed and on the run briefly, at least until he teams up with psychic medium Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane) and scarred soldier Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) to fight the rise of the Blood Queen.
Summarising HELLBOY’s plot in a lone paragraph proved to be a Herculean task, primarily because it rarely sticks to a singular narrative for long. Perhaps sensing that this would be the only shot at a hard R-rated adaptation of the character, Cosby and Neil Marshall have taken the kitchen sink approach. It’s not so much a straight path as a train of thought: it’s a film that flashes back to 517AD, the Second World War, and 1992 for three completely different plot threads.
The genuinely crazy thing is that while it doesn’t feel cohesive, it maintains the same anarchic sense of fun. It is, for want of a better phrase, consistently inconsistent. In one moment Hellboy is fighting giants, and it feels like only two moves before he’s pashing Baba Yaga in her chicken leg house. That several characters have also been introduced in this time, including a BPRD soldier with a past and a large talking hog, is par for the course. Marshall is having a ball rolling around in references, and we have little choice but to just go with it.
Ron Perlman may have defined the character for many audiences, but Harbour does a good job of making the role his own. Under the heavy makeup, Harbour’s deep drawl often sounds like he is chewing gravel, but he’s handy in a firefight. The apparently ageless and immortal Jovovich isn’t given nearly enough screen time, and if the Resident Evil franchise has taught us anything, it’s that she alone can keep a CG nightmare afloat. Sasha Lane, who impressed in American Honey and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, seems adrift and miscast in an underdeveloped role. McShane just does McShane, and that’s okay with me if it is with you.
Unlike Del Toro’s high stylised predecessors, Marshall’s signature brand (developed through Dog Soldiers, The Descent, and multiple TV credits) is much more visceral. No opportunity is missed for an evisceration, degloving, or decapitation as limbs fly as freely as plot points. (It comes as no surprise it received an R18+ in Australia, an increasingly rare classification these days). Much of this is achieved via the inconsistent CG, which alternates between gorgeous shots of monsters dominating London to a bizarre vision of McShane’s head floating on top of a decaying spirit. (It’s seriously weird). That said, Hellboy with a flaming crown and sword will never stop being cool.
As HELLBOY reaches its climactic conclusion, and trades flashbacks for flashforwards, it rather optimistically gives us pre, mid, and post-credits stings of future things to come in the franchise. These Easter eggs might not eventuate in any sequels if the box office fails to light up, but they at least contextualise this version of Hellboy within a larger universe with spin-off potential. So, if there’s any justice, we’ll be seeing more of Lobster Johnson in the future.
2019 | US | DIRECTOR: Neil Marshall | WRITER: Andrew Crosby (based on the Dark Horse Comics by Mike Mignola) | CAST: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, Daniel Dae Kim, Thomas Haden Church | RUNNING TIME: 121 minutes | DISTRIBUTOR: Roadshow Films (AUS) | RELEASE DATE: 11 April 2019 (AUS)
