MOVIE REVIEW
“Hellboy”
Rated R. At AMC Loews Boston Common, Regal Fenway Stadium and suburban theaters.
Grade: B
“Hellboy” is back, and he isn’t quite as great as he used to be when Guillermo del Toro directed the films and Ron Perlman played the title role.
For one, his look is off. This new Hellboy, played by David Harbour (“Stranger Things”) and directed by British “splat pack” filmmaker Neil Marshall (“The Descent,” “Game of Thrones”), looks more like the Mike Mignola comic book Hellboy.
The action starts with a flashback to 517 A.D. with scenes in which a witch named Nimue, aka the Blood Queen (“Resident Evil” lead Milla Jovovich), spreads plague and gets executed by none other than King Arthur, who cuts her into bloody pieces with Excalibur and has the pieces, still alive, buried all over England.
In the present time, Hellboy is in Tijuana, searching for a fellow agent named Ruiz (Mario de la Rosa) from the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, who stayed in Mexico as a Lucha Libre wrestler after dealing with a nest of vampires.
Soon, Hellboy is back in England on the trail of Nimue’s pieces, which are being put back together with the help of Gruagach (Stephen Graham), a giant with the head of a hog. Hellboy still has a bantering father-son relationship with “dad” Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm (Ian McShane, in a part originally played by the late, great John Hurt). Hellboy’s demon-and-ghost-busting sidekicks this time are clairvoyant Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane, “American Honey”) and BPRD agent Major Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim, “Hawaii Five-0”).
The big, world-rescuing showdown is in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.
This new “Hellboy,” which is based on a 2008 comic book series by Mignola and adapted to the screen by Andrew Cosby (TV’s “Eureka”), is at times totally nuts and slipshod. But the effects are fun and inventive for a change, and Marshall’s punk rock sensibility works well with a lot, if not all, of the demonic shenanigans going on.
Lane is appealing as Monaghan, who has more magic powers than she is aware of and occasionally has a gooey, funnel-shaped corkscrew of ectoplasm emerge from her mouth, ending in the shape of the recently, speaking dead. Kim could be a breakout character.
Jovovich, who fails to give the awful line, “Revenge is the only sustenance I require” the right crazy spin, is no Barbara Steele (“Black Sunday”) or Eva Green (“Penny Dreadful”) for that matter. This new Hellboy features an origin story told in a flashback boasting the one and only Rasputin (Marcos Rounthwaite) as the wizard, who, under the watchful eye of Nazis (holy “Raiders of the Lost Ark”), uses black magic in a desperate attempt to summon a Nazi ally from the underworld.
Sophie Okonedo appears as the ethereal seer and Osiris Club member Lady Hatton. Thomas Haden Church pops up almost out of nowhere as the “Hellboy” character Lobster Johnson. Some of the film’s best scenes feature the Slavic witch Baba Yaga, who lives in a house with giant legs and whose diabolical contortions are courtesy of the remarkably bendy sensation Troy James.
(“Hellboy” contains extreme bloody violence and gruesome and frightening images.)
