Today’s comic comes care of Becky. All she has to say on the matter is that my name is now Ig, and hers is Bo. That is our caveman names. I am her Uggsban.

Now let’s talk about how Hellboy (2019) is a terrible movie.

I’m a Magnolia fan. His artwork is top notch and those giant Hellboy Tomes are something I hope to own on my shelf one day. The OG Hellboy movies by Del Toro are cult classics for good reason. But this new Hellboy movie is just not great at all. This won’t be spoiler town, so if you’re worried about that, you’re fine.

Let’s start with Hellboy as a character.

What I can say without giving anything away is that we meet late career Hellboy, he’s interacted with pretty much every mythological beast at this point, but whoever scraped this film together couldn’t bear the idea of not going through reboot territory and making it an origin flick at the same time. So while Hellboy may have a rapport with Egyptian Gods he’s still got some elementary blindspots in his own origin, which just comes across really jarring and out of place.

Rather than a laid back kind of guy who cracks a one liner occasionally they’ve turned him into a little bitch who doesn’t even want to be in his own movie.

Plot:

It’s fucked. They introduce new characters every five minutes and barely slow down. The pacing is cranked to 11, but unfortunately it’s a boring 11 which meanders and dicks about, unusual for 11.

There are genuinely great moments in the movie, but they only serve to highlight how stink the rest of the film is. It’s frustrating because I feel like they had bits of a good movie in there. It could have been a great movie, and that just makes it worse.

Editing:

I swear this movie was still getting chopped a day out from release. There’s one moment where the audio and score cuts in a really abrupt way with the visuals. It felt like the movie was scrubbing forwards a bit. I can only pinpoint one instance this happened, and you could easily miss it. Action shots were pretty average, except for a scene right before rolling credits.

What WAS awesome was the monster design. Some of the monsters were so cool but got far less screen time than they deserved.

This movie was a bloated mess overall though, and could have done with a tighter more interesting cast and story. It tried going big and bombastic and they just couldn’t manage it.