HELLBOY (2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical. psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This HELLBOY was intended to be a reboot of the two-film series directed by Guillermo del Toro in the 2000s. but the 2019 movie came a cropper in the box office. 

I was never a big fan of the HELLBOY comics. I bought the series for a little while when it began, as I liked Mike Mignola's art, but I thought his plots were pretty ordinary and didn't deliver for me much emotional resonance. I'd have to say the same for the two animated projects I've reviewed on this blog, and the two live-action films I've seen but not yet reviewed, though I liked star Ron Perlman in the role quite a bit. 

Since I didn't follow the comics, I haven't read any of the narratives that are said to have influenced the script, credited to Andrew Crosby, though apparently both creator Mike Mignola and fantasy-author Christopher Golden contributed as well. But frankly, while the Perlman-del Toro films also struck me as merely adequate, this version capitalizes on the feature's need for psychological depth.

While I don't need to see every hero screaming his discontents to the heavens, the fact that Hellboy began life as a demon-child cast out of Hell into the Earth-realm, and adopted by a human "father," suggests more than a little potential character conflict. The Perlman Hellboy tended to toss off his alienation from mortals with a grunt and a smart remark. But this script foregrounds the New Hellboy (David Harbour) with the sense of being a complete outsider, constantly risking his life to battle malign occult monsters and magicians, and yet not bonded to the people he fights for. He also has a lot of daddy issues with his adoptive parent Professor Broom (Ian MacShane), in that Hellboy suspects maybe Broom just wanted a monstrous tool to use against supernatural threats.

The newest threat involves a sorceress named Nimue (Milla Jovavich), slain and torn into pieces by the sword Excalibur in the days of Merlin and King Arthur. Nimue is getting brought back to life in 21st-century Britain by various old foes of Hellboy, such as the pig-demon Gruagach and the witch Baba Yaga. What makes this recrudescence stand out from many similar ones, both in the HELLBOY franchise and in horror films generally, is that Nimue wants to bring Hellboy into her rulership of Earth. This sort of temptation is familiar as well, but the script blends it with the hero's doubts about his mission and his foster father's motives. 

Since Hellboy can't trust Broom, he gets some human (or quasi-human) allies to cheer him on. To be sure, Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) is a reluctant ally, an M-11 agent investigating Nimue's activities, and he tends to greet the monster-hero with jeers more than cheers. The other major ally is Hellboy's former childhood friend Alice Monaghan, now an adult woman (Sasha Lane). I found these performer's contributions to the big fight-scenes tended to mitigate some of the sameness of the battle-stategies of the hero, who is of course basically a Real Big Guy with a Gun. 

I must assume from the film's 'R' rating that the producers made a conscious decision to push the envelope on gore, and I applaud the effects. I don't imagine director Neil Marshall deserves sole credit for the improvement, but his HELLBOY is light years beyond the so-so thrills of the 2008 DOOMSDAY. I particularly enjoyed how Marshall and company raised the ante on the standard "opening of the gates of hell" trope, by having well designed hellspawn attacking Brit citizens by mutilating them with Boschian creativity. I won't go into Hellboy's interesting connections with Arthurian mythology, but these associations work reasonably well, though I suspect the ideas had some very episodic origins. Indeed, I could have lived without the subplot about the Osiris Society, who are introduced and then play no major role in the story. OTOH, I quite liked Hellboy's visit to Mexico despite its irrelevance to the main plot, because his squaring off against a vampire luchador seemed like an affectionate homage to the wrestling-genre of Mexican cinema.

Harbour in my view is just as good as Perlman was in the role, and though Dae Kim's character doesn't have much of an arc, the saucy stylings of Sasha Lane add some comic touches in addition to some strong fight-scenes. I glanced at a few negative reviews but it's like these guys saw a different movie than I did. Given how much homogenized horror is out there, all the filmmakers here delivered a consistent level of grue and creepiness. Supposedly, despite the bad box office, a sequel remains in the works.