I knew from the first 5 minutes that this wasn’t going to be a good movie, that it’s not as bad as I thought it would be is a compliment.
From the moment this film starts it’s filled with exposition after exposition, character introductions, plot being spouted out at us; it’s incessant, annoying and completely unnecessary. It’s not like we can accurately follow half of whats going on anyway. Whereas the original Hellboy relied on visual storytelling, this film decides to just tell us how every characters feels, what every character thinks and is going to do. However, it has its moments, there are times where the Hellboy in this film genuinely worked, where the fight sequences were interesting and the visuals were quite nice. But alas, those times are too few for me to recommend this film.
The beginning of the film is a complete mess but once the pace picks up a bit the film gets a little better. I thought the fight scene between Hellboy and the 3 giant creatures in a field was kind of nice, though I could have done without the rock music that didn’t really fit in anywhere in the movie. The whole scene where a boar monster pieces together the body parts of an ancient sorcerer I really liked. At times I also genuinely enjoyed this new version of the Hellboy character, the scene where he punches an elevator that keeps continually taking him down was hilarious and afterwards his entrance into some Howl’s Moving Castle themed setting and his encounter with some old hag I thought was really cool.
Yet the incessant one liners, the sloppy characterization of Hellboy and his father, with a joke thrown in every minute, got on my nerves. There are some genuine moments between Hellboy and his father that have little impact because it seems as though their relationship was just one big laugh. I couldn’t stand this film when it was trying to be funny and when it got serious I couldn’t take it seriously. And it’s not just Hellboy and his father, all the other characters are so lazily written and unexplored. There is a part in the film where someone literally recounts the exact plot of Predator as something that once happened to them. I was waiting for the punchline, the “haha, this isn’t my life but just the plot of a movie” moment but … it never came. The writers of this film just used the plot of Predator as a backstory for one of their characters … I mean, really ? How lazy can you get ?
But, as I mentioned, there are moments where the absurd qualities of this film’s lazy production and writing come together into something worth watching but those moments occupy maybe 30 minutes of the 2 hour run-time. The rest feels like a marathon. Every now and then in the film you will see nods to the great works of Guillermo Del Torro, I wonder what he thought of this film.
