Review: Hellboy

Supposedly the reason that we even have a third Hellboy movie is that everyone in Hollywood who isn't Disney or Warner Brothers really really wants to get into the comic book universe business and Hellboy is one of the few reasonably well-developed, big name comic book titles that hasn't already been snapped up. There's no actual artistic reason for this movie to exist, no story behind it anyone was clamoring to tell. Boy, does it show.

That said, this version does at least make a few small gestures towards coming up with a slightly different vision of the character than the one seen in the two earlier, better films by Guillermo del Toro: this Hellboy (David Harbour) works solo for much of the film, feels a little more sullen (possibly explained by the character still being in his teens or early twenties emotionally; demons age a lot slower) and has more of a heavy metal vibe. None of which make him more of a fun character to watch, strangely enough; he's firing out what should be decent one-liners but pretty much none of them land.

The story involves bad guys putting together the pieces of the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich), who was chopped up by King Arthur in an amusingly over-the-top opening scene. But it also involves Hellboy being in a funk, being attacked by people who think he's set to bring about the end of the world, being set up by an old enemy, making new friends, fighting a bunch of side monsters who just happen to be passing by, and after a while none of it really seems to matter.

Director Neil Marshall, working from an overstuffed script by Andrew Cosby, throws just about everything at the wall here, mostly body parts - this is definitely going for a hard-R when it comes to gore, but the underfunded CGI renders pretty much all of it ineffective. The script feels like there's at least three separate stories going on, which is probably the point as pulp excess is part of Hellboy's charm. But Marshall never manages to get to tone right, with what should be big moments slipping away and important plot points undersold.

Then again, it could just be that the shoot was a tough one. Some characters simply vanish from the story, while close-eyed viewers might notice that Ian McShane's Trevor Bruttenholm (AKA Hellboy's dad) has an outfit change in the middle of a scene. The joins are mostly smoothed over, mostly because the film pinballs from one scenario to another at such at rate that next to none of it sticks. There's at least three bad guys, two of which are using the others while the character sold as the main bad guy is really a puppet plus everyone else thinks the real threat is Hellboy anyway. Whatever happened to just punching out a bunch of monsters?

There's a bunch of that too, but while the monster designs are good the fights are just more weightless CGI. There's a sense here that if one element had worked the rest would have clicked into place, but everything is just that little bit sub-par and the whole thing ends up just staggering around.  To be fair, the del Toro films had their problems too; despite the seemingly movie-friendly premise, the Hellboy comics are actually pretty weird when you look at them, with creator Mike Mignola's soaked-in-black-ink artwork serving up haunting images the movies could never replicate. Maybe the character just doesn't work outside of them.

This is the kind of weird mess that often ends up being acclaimed as an overlooked gem a decade later. Those future nerds are wrong. When your film's one decent laugh comes in a post-credit scene - you really can't go wrong with Thomas Haden Church - you're definitely not working as a comedy; unless you really like computer-generated splattered heads, this barely gets over the line as anything else .

- Anthony Morris