Saturday, April 13, 2019

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here


David Harbour in Hellboy (2019)

"The devil is not as black as he is painted." -- Dante, The Inferno


I have to admit, I was looking forward to the new Hellboy movie in spite of the wave of negative reviews that hit the week before it opened. I mean, sure, it was never going to be Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy, and it would take a bit of getting used to someone beside Ron Perlman in the role, but things move on with these sorts of franchise movies. If anything, I thought David Harbour was pretty good casting and I've liked Neil Marshall's work in the past (even the critically derided Doomsday). And Mike Mignola's comics provide a wealth of material. Too much so, as it turns out. Marshall's Hellboy (2019) reminds me a bit of Doomsday, in so far as it's a mishmash of various sources. It plays a bit like an anthology film, with the film's main plot acting as a framing sequence. This does the film no favors though.