I can kind of take or leave Hellboy. I didn’t like Guillermo del Toro’s original, but I did enjoy the second one quite a bit. This reboot from Neil (Doomsday) Marshall stars Stranger Things’ David Harbour as Hellboy, taking over the role from Ron Perlman. Best of all, it has Milla Jovovich as the evil “Blood Queen”.
I didn’t really have any expectations for this going in. I will say, five minutes into the movie, and already King Arthur decapitated a witch and Hellboy fought in a Lucha Libre match with a literal bat man. Fortunately, that kitchen sink vibe carried throughout the entire film. It’s shit like this made me enjoy this iteration even more than del Toro’s films.
Hellboy learns the apocalypse is coming, and since an ancient prophecy foretold he will be the one to bring it about, everyone wants to kill him. Meanwhile, the Blood Queen, who was chopped up and had her body parts hidden across the globe, is slowly coming back together to wreak havoc on mankind. The only thing that can stop her is the legendary sword, Excalibur. The only problem is that if Hellboy uses it, he’ll make the prophecy come true.
This Hellboy is a Hard R. It’s gory as all get out, with plenty of blood, guts, tongues ripped out, and decapitated heads aplenty. There are also pig men, pig babies, giants, a house that walks around on two feet, witches, zombies, a werecheetah, and a bunch of sick looking kaiju (including one that has a hand for a dick). I admire Marshall’s “anything goes” approach, even if it sometimes yields uneven results. Still, it all feels like a Neil Marshall movie, which is a good thing.
It helps that Milla is smoking hot in this. There’s even a scene where she has some Boxing Helena action going on where she’s just a torso and her limbs are strewn everywhere and I’m thinking to myself… WOULD.
Harbour isn’t bad. He’s scruffy and grumpy and gets a few laughs, but I did miss the pathos Perlman brought to the role. Ian McShane lends his usual sense of gravitas as Hellboy’s dad and Thomas Haden Church is also amusing in an extended cameo as Lobster Johnson.
No one really took to this version (which is a shame), so they rebooted the property… again with Hellboy: The Crooked Man five years later.
No comments:
Post a Comment