TEN COMMENTS ABOUT: HELLBOY 2019
The curiosity factor got to me so I went to see the new Hellboy on Cinemark’s $5 Tuesday. It’s it as bad as the reviews suggest?
1. “Hellboy ‘19” is bad but I’d call it a big mess with lots of poor design, story and effects choices.
2. David Harbour does the best with the material he’s given so his career won’t be torpedoed because of his performance and one good thing about Hellboy’s makeup, it doesn’t totally obscure his facial expressions like the rubber mask Ron Perlman wore.
3. But the color is wrong (a weird dark pink); the horn stubs look fake a sh#t; his overall face looks scrunched; and that gawd-awful long hair is figuratively and literally a mess (and I won’t comment on his rubber chest piece).
4. Kudos to Ed Skrein who was originally cast as Daimio for stepping down when her learned the character is Japanese-American in the comics (Scarlett Johansson I hope you’re reading this!)
5. But I wasn’t impressed with Daniel Dae Kim who took over the role of Daimio - for some stupid reason the writer decided to make him British and Kim’s accent rang false - in fact I thought it might have been dubbed by a different actor.
6. I loved Milla Jovovich as Leeloo so I always cut her some slack, but she came across as lackluster, not really the main villain.
7. And every new character gets an origin flash-back right after they are introduced - ugh!
8. Guillermo del Toro’s design aesthetic was otherworldly; but the creature design here is more in line with any typical horror movie - going for gross and rubbery rather than original.
9. The movie Rated R so there are lots and lots of limbs dismembered, bodies torn in half, brains chopped open, blood spilled... it goes on and on... the comics might have had violent stories but they weren’t gorefests; and there are only so many times you want to see Hellboy tosses and beaten like a rag doll.
10. Some of the effects were terrible - in particular one critical to the finale; a character barfs up ghosts who appear at the end of long blobby CGI intestines (you sort of have to see it to unbelieve it); anyway I haven’t seen effects that bad since the blob-vampire at the end of the first “Blade” movie.
Bonus: This is the second movie I’ve seen this year where a descendent of King Arthur has to pull Excalibur from the stone and save the world from demon hordes.
