Plot In a Nutshell: After Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman’s two adaptations of the Dark Horse/ Mike Migola demon superhero comic we now have this reboot of the Hellboy film franchise – this time Big Red is played by David Harbour (Stranger Things) and the director is Neil Marshall (The Descent). The plot involves the resurrection of the evil Blood Queen (Milla Jojovich) who threatens to unleash a deadly plague on the Earth – that is unless Hellboy, his adopted father (Ian McShane) and the B.P.R.D can stop her first.
The Good: Its fairly watchable, Harbour does well as Hellboy, McShane is his usual charismatic self, one or two of the set pieces are ok plus the design work and make up effects are very imaginative.
The Bad: Dear God where to start? – With the exception of McShane, most of the supporting cast are terrible – the worst offenders being Daniel Dae Kim as a BPRD agent with an iffy Dick Van Dyke British accent and Milla Jojovich gurning for all her worth as the Blood Queen.
Its gets worse – the script seems to have been written by a 12 year old – all F bombs and juvenile humour – with hardly one quip or funny line managing to raise more than a titter, the special effects are extremely poor and look cheap, its badly edited, overly loud, a potentially interesting plot involving King Arthur is wasted and most of the action scenes are boring and generic.
Best Scene: The last 2 mins which to be fair is a well handled one take shoot out that sets things up for a sequel
Summary: A pointless reboot and a staggering disappointment which pales in comparison to Del Toro’s films – made even worse by the fact that its directed by Neil Marshall – a superb film maker who gave us The Descent and Dog Soldiers and directed two of the best ever Game Of Thrones episodes (Black Water and The Watchers on The Wall). Yes ill admit David Harbour is good as HB but his performance doesn’t really distinguish itself in any way from Ron Perlman’s previous take on the character. Over all i have no idea why the studio decided to reboot this franchise as both Del Toro and Perlman have both said for years that they were happy to return for a third film and considering that Hellboy 1 and Helloy 2 did pretty well at the box office it beggars belief that no one took them up on their offer.
Crap
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The Austin Powers to Phil Hobden’s Dr Evil, it’s fair to say Will spends his life trying to convince Phil that Paul WS Anderson ISNT a bad filmmaker, that The Hobbit movies really are THAT good and, for the most part, Phil is wrong about most things. Which he is.
