Boy, oh boy – the new Hellboy film has taken a critical panning. Before even reaching its first weekend, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes had pelted it with an approval rating of just 12%, based on 97 reviews.
Surely it can’t be that bad?
Well, sure enough, it isn’t.
Let’s be clear – it isn’t Guillermo del Toro and isn’t Ron Perlman. The 2004 and 2008 films that the director and actor collaborated on are huge fun and the latter turned in a pair of iconic performances. I can’t stop smiling at the scene in the second film where lovelorn Hellboy and Abe Sapien drunkenly sing along to Barry Manilow.
But let’s also be clear – in a lot of ways, this screen reboot is actually closer to the look and feel of Mike Mignola’s original Hellboy comics – and I have loved those for years.
Here, we get the requisite origin reminder: demon baby Hellboy, summoned up by Rasputin for the Nazis in a last-ditch effort to win the war (and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl), but saved and adopted by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, founder of The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, a joint UK-US body.
The key plot here centres on an ancient sorceress, Nimue, The Blood Queen (Lady of the Lake), defeated centuries earlier by King Arthur, but now back with a vengeance and planning to wipe out humanity so that ‘monsters’ can live un-threatened in a new Eden.
No spoilers from me on the plot. But it is entirely in keeping with Mignola’s originals, which weave the modern with folklore and fairytale. Indeed, the comics were where I first learned of Baba Yaga (who crops up here too, in a seriously creepy piece of CGI work).
It’s violent – as are the comics – and indeed, the fight scenes capture the gravity-defying sense of action (and incredible composition) in Mignola’s original drawings (see left).
I’ve seen the film described as a bit all over the place, but I can’t see that. Perhaps not as tight as it could be, but it didn’t lag for me.
David Harbour as the eponymous hero seems to be feeling his way into the character: some early method mumbling doesn’t help, but by the second half of the film, when he’s getting sterling support from Sasha Lane as Alice Monaghan, a young woman with supernatural abilities, and Daniel Dae Kin as BPRD veteran Ben Daimio, he seems much more comfortable.
There’s sardonic humour, badass monsters and fight scenes aplenty, and a straight-up Mignola mash-up of folklore and mythology.
Ian McShane adds to all this as Bruttenholm, Hellboy’s daddy, while Milla Jovovich provides scary, sexy class as Nimue.
It’s not perfect, but it’s also light years away from Marvel ands light years better than most of what DC has done in recent years. For me, as a long-time Hellboy fan, Neil Marshall’s film is a rollicking romp in the Hellboy universe and I hope we’ll see more.
After all – they can’t leave things just as the new team discovers Abe Sapien!
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