REVIEW: David Harbour’s ‘Hellboy’ Reboot Should Go Straight To Hell

David Harbour’s Hellboy should have been snapped out of reality by Thanos.

Imagine you begin a comic book movie franchise with Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman. The franchise becomes successful enough to spawn a sequel and said sequel ultimately does OK. After a few years, the cast begins to campaign for a third film to complete the trilogy. But, because you run a big multi-billion dollar-earning studio, you think you’re the smartest guy on the planet. So you wait a few years and you eventually reboot the whole thing, ignoring fans and the creative team of the original. 

Now, the only problem with that is you’re developing this reboot and nobody genuinely wants it to happen. You announce the cast, shoot the movie, then release the first trailer and everyone thinks it looks bad. The second trailer arrives and it barely does anything to sway the audience. Then the rest of the marketing campaign is absolutely horrible and you can probably guess what happens next — opening weekend projections are a bit on the low side and it looks like the film will probably not even make its budget back. Your star then joins another comic book movie universe and everyone is really quiet about your movie. This all adds up to Lionsgate rebooting Hellboy with David Harbour.

Last night, I had the chance to catch an early screening of the Hellboy reboot starring Stranger Things actor David Harbour, and what I saw was as bad as it gets. First and foremost, Hellboy starts out with a flaw that’ll bug out iPhone users around the world. Now, I won’t get into spoilers for the film, but the story is pretty accurate to the original comics by Mike Mignola. However, Hellboy isn’t as smooth as it could have been, as the film is punished by its lack of a fluid story and the different sidestories it tells that don’t really add up to anything important.

Hellboy begins with David Harbour doing his best “Michael Chiklis as the Thing from Fantastic Four” impression, and it’s the most irritating part of the movie. As a fan of David Harbour and Hellboy, I was very disappointed to see the terrible performances that plague this film. Ian McShane tries his best to play the cool foster dad and while his character is supposed to be very comedic, I never laughed at what was supposed to be funny. Instead, I found myself mocking his over-the-top performance. 

Daniel Dae Kim plays Benjamin Daimio, an Asian-British shapeshifter who can transform into a jaguar. The actor’s accent is absolutely horrible, and his character’s reasoning for being a douche never really adds up. Meanwhile, Sasha Lane as Alice Monaghan is probably the most unbelievable casting in the film. She plays a young psychic that speaks to the dead and gets knee-deep in the mess and has to defend herself. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing and her character left me in a hysterical state as it was pretty funny to see a scrawny kid taking on a bunch of supernatural creatures.

As for the actions sequences, they were almost Transformers-level bad with very loud noises and a ton of unnecessary destruction. You’ll even see an old lady shooting a fully automatic weapon like she’s Al Pachino in Scarface. Then there’s Milla Jovovich as Nimue the Blood Queen, a.k.a. the most laughable aspect of the movie. She doesn’t do much until the final moments of the film when Jovovich finally enacts her poorly put together plan, which is god awful and doesn’t work in the superhero movie climate that we’re currently in. The path that leads us to Nimue is by far the worst arc I’ve ever seen in a comic book movie. Her ploy to get Hellboy to become her king leads us on this weird adventure that involves a warthog human hybrid, King Arthur, his sword and the Wizard Merlin. The whole thing left me flabbergasted and I feel bad for the talented people involved in this terrible, terrible film.

Overall Thoughts: Hellboy begins as a fun comic book epic and is ultimately held down by its convoluted story, over-the-top acting, poor direction and its push to begin a universe. The movie is painful to sit through and has some pretty graphic scenes and language throughout, so I wouldn’t advise to bring your kids to this one. David Harbour gives one of his worst performances and it’s so saddening because he’s a better actor than this film leads you to believe. I guess it’s a good thing you can barely tell that it was him. I wouldn’t even recommend this film to my worst enemy. Hellboy is like a relationship that you thought was going to be great and then by the end of it you have no idea what went wrong. To hell with it… that was a goddamn travesty.

Final Score: 4/10