Hellboy 2019

• Directed by Neil Marshall
• April 9, 2019 (NYC) / April 12, 2019 (US)
• Based on Hellboy created by Mike Mignola

Hellboy must stop a resurrected sorceress from taking over the world.

A new Hellboy movie? Yay! But without Guillermo del Toro or Ron Perlman? Ugh! They say Hellboy 2019 started out as a sequel to Hellboy II: The Golden Army but when certain conditions were not met it was repurposed into a reboot and that really shows. David Harbour may not be Ron Perlman, but he was perhaps the closest to a good choice as this movie got.

Rather than being an ensemble piece like the first two films, the story is largely carried by the character of Hellboy with the others being minor to incidental. Unfortunately there is little charm to the central character. He laments (whines) being turned into a weapon against magical creatures but demonstrates nothing that makes him capable of self-direction.

Milla Jovovich is the villainous Blood Queen Vivienne Nimue who, like Rasputin in the first films, plans on using Hellboy to bring about global destruction by having him embrace his destiny as Anung Un Rama. I am not reflexively a Milla Jovovich hater but not everybody can play a villain. Jovovich never sounds evil or dangerous. Nimue comes off as someone irritated by a mild inconvenience. This is the second film I’ve seen where she was a villain of some type and she can’t do it.

Hellboy 2019 has some cool moments but it’s missing the magic of the first two. There is nothing more to the story than what can be obtained from a surface glance. Hellboy is missing his previous complexity as well. Worse he lashes out at Professor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane) as needed to move things along and not as a logical reaction to actions/events.

Ian McShane as Bruttenholm is just too dashing. He looks like the guy that mother’s warm their daughters about or that a woman might think of when reading a romance novel. Being the type of person that I am, he looks nothing like the iteration from the comics and that bothers me. Was a simple white whig too much to ask for?

There was some padding here such as the scene with the Osiris Club. It did nothing but give an excuse for a fight scene. And why did Baba Yaga (Emma Tate-voice/Troy James on-set) basically show her hand to Hellboy? Those types of scenes never make sense, but it certainly set her up as a bigger villain.

Daniel Dae Kim is wasted as Ben Daimio and Sasha Lane as Alice Monaghan is really pointless. Is she intended as a love interest for Ben or Hellboy because she has almost no chemistry with either yet something is implied on both ends. Her contributions to the story are minimal as are Ben’s. Lane in particular as an actress has the same expression as Tessa Thompson wears in most performances and that is of being inconvenienced to be there. Kim is a good actor but never gets to shine. Both sport questionable accents.

There is just no imagination to any of this. It is a world of fantasy and horror but it is not really used. No humor. No cool factor despite trying so hard to be a badass R rated superhero movie. There are dark fairytale creatures present yet Hellboy 2019 feels very by the numbers. Great visuals in all the right places but it does nothing for the movie.

Hellboy 2019 is missing that special magic of the first two. Feels like a pale imitation of a good idea. Pass.