The recent release of Hellboy (2019, aka Hellboy: Call of Darkness) is what Hollywood likes to call rebooting the franchise, but, in this case, it’s more along the lines of sinking the franchise. This origin story is divergent from the original movie, and not to its benefit. The original utilized a legendary ambiguity from history, the Russian religious man Rasputin, who survives his own death through the instrumentality of the Ogdru Jahad, a race of monstrous entities in another dimension, who seek to invade our dimension for purposes of, well, that’s not really stated, but what the hell. The creature who becomes known as Hellboy is sent through a portal Rasputin opens for the Nazis with a mission: to open a permanent portal for use by the Ogdru Jahad to destroy and invade.
But, in the original, Hellboy is converted to our side, using his immense powers to battle various paranormal monsters, until Rasputin returns for another bite of the pie.
In this Hellboy, the eponymous hero comes through a portal, but there’s little hint of how or why, only the question of why his adoptive father didn’t kill him immediately. The final response, delivered from beyond the grave, is unsatisfying.
Both movies try to examine the reaction of a semi-monster to a society not quite ready to accept him, but, in this version, his occasional appearance in public doesn’t seem to cause much more than curiosity. Is this alienating? When he’s dispatched to help a, well, club of monster hunters, it’s a lot of fun watching him take down both monsters and betrayers, but it does get repetitive, and the innovative end of the fight is impaired by that repetition; the choreography needed to be better.
It doesn’t help that Hellboy comes off as whiny and needy, and thus unlikeable, and that he also appears to be cross-eyed, which isn’t a dig at a harmless physical abnormality so much as wondering how one wins fights with seriously impaired vision.
In the end, both versions present Hellboy with a reason to change sides to be with the bad guys, but while in the original Hellboy is broken by the death of his beloved, in the new version he’s to be lured by the legendary witch Nimue, a brutal would-be ruler, and it’s unsurprising that Hellboy chooses to stick with the good guys.
It was a disappointing viewing.
