Hellboy (2019)

"Aw, Crap!" (The Once and Future Hellboy)
or
"You Should Have Quit...When You Were a Head."

I guess you have to mention it because this one's a re-boot (even though one should give the devil his due), but Guillermo del Toro made two middling movies out of Mike Mignola's well-read and well-praised indie comic "Hellboy," a weird occultish comic character that combined the artist's bizarre design instincts with a dead-pan sense of humor, mixed with healthy doses of steam-punk and Lovecraftian monster-conspiracies.

And Nazi's. Lots and lots of Nazi's.

And as good as del Toro is and can be, his Hellboy movies were a little watered-down from Mignola's concept. For example, his Hellboy talked too much, and the director kept insisting on shoe-horning a love story into the Hellboy mix (which was complicated enough). Del Toro kept the origin story with Mignola's concept of a demon-spawn brought from the depths of Hell by by the Nazi's during the waning days of WWII—a plan thwarted by American G.I.'s under the command of paranormal investigators.

He also kept the idea that Hellboy is an indispensable paranormal investigator—often cited as the foremost and greatest—for the B.P.R.D. (The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense and no, it doesn't exist, but I'm pretty sure Trump would want one), whose operations explore spooky phenomenon of a negative nature throughout the world. 

So Hellboy has been re-booted with a new actor starring—the versatile and ubiquitous David Harbour*—and a new attitude, but not a new title (Let's call it Hellboy 2019, for clarity's sake). But, with twelve—count 'em—twelve producers, you have the very definition of two many cooks in the kitchen and one's expectations for an over-baked Royal Cluster run very high.

They did one thing right: this version hews very closely to Mignola's storylines from the books "The Wild Hunt" and "The Storm and the Fury." In them, Hellboy along with a clairevoyent he saved as a child, Alice Monaghan—the "g" is silent—(Sasha Lane) team up with a M11 operative named Major Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) to battle the evil sorceress Nimue (Milla Jovovich), the so-called "Queen of Blood" who, in olden times, was killed by King Arthur with the sword Excalibur. At that time she was cut into six pieces and buried in various places around the island so that she could never threaten England again, but...the best laid-and-buried plans and all...

After a brief sojourn to Mexico to find a missing BPRD agent, Hellboy is invited to England by the ancient Order of the Osiris Group to dispose of three giants, but things go badly for him and he is rescued by Alice, when it is discovered that the plans of Nimue...and parts of Nimue...are coming together and that isn't good. The last piece of the Queen is, coincidentally, at the Osiris Club and when a raid is staged it is found that everyone there has been slaughtered. Blimey. Hell to the Queen.

The story is very streamlined—whole chunks of it have been sliced and diced to give the film-story more flow and make it less complicated**...and costly. What separates this adaptation, though, from its source or from the other two movies is its tone, which is arch and gigglingly nihilistic. It's odd, and probably a little early, to say that this re-boot adheres to the "Deadpool" school of film-making where you can't take anything very seriously, except that "school" may have already had its shark jumped—the first Deadpool movie was fine, but the second one kinda stunk up the place. It also reminds of those Rob Zombie movies where any action has to be backed by heavy-metal music..and be a bit incomprehensible in strategy and artistry. It's designed to merely by visceral.

And there's a lot of viscera on display.

This Hellboy, the re-booted, has a lot of gore to it—not something one associates with the comics—and if one is expecting something along the lines of the first two movies, they will likely be surprised and shocked by this "R"-version. More carnage, more "F"-bombs and general nastiness are on display. Gosh, Hellboy even says "shit" a few times when previously the worst you'd get out of him was "Aw, crap!!"...which I always found charming coming from a spawn of Satan. This approach is far less charming.

This one is more like the WWF produced Hellboy with a grungier representation of the character. Oh, he's still a good guy (in danger of being bad), just more of a slob, although it might actually be fun to see him sweat, if he could do so through all the make-up and yak-fur. And one can't the actor under all that goo; Harbour does a fine job, playing the role the way you'd think John Goodman would play it—a good choice, that. Hellboy shouldn't be cuddly, but he should be blunt and loud whenever he gets around to saying something, which he shouldn't do too much.

One also gets a whiff of producer-tinkering; some of the edited transitions are a little dicey. Marshall has done a few horror films and a lot of television work, but one suspects there is material left on the cutting room floor from his original intentions. There might have been some grace-notes deemed expendable from the producing squad. Too bad. Because this Hellboy could have used a bit more grace.

Nimue: You are a king. We belong together, you and I.

Hellboy: We do. But it's not going to work, you know, 

'cause I'm a Capricorn and you're fucking nuts!

(Actually, it should be pointed out that Hellboy's birthday is October 5th, making him a Libra)

The first appearance by "Hellboy" (above) and page samples (below)

* Here's the guy in Black Mass and Quantum of Solace. Yeah, you know him.

** Kudo's to whoever left the scenes with "Lobster" Johnson, Mignola's 1930's era "Mystery-Man" adventurer from the series. You have to "be there" to appreciate it. But, as portrayed by Thomas Haden Church, it was the most enjoyable part of the movie for me.