Hellboy Review

Hellboy was directed by Neil Marshall and stars David Harbour, Mila Jovovitch, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, Daniel Dae Kim. and Thomas Haden Church.

This film follows the titular protagonist and his team as they attempt to stop the resurrection of an evil sorceress who wants to unleash a plague upon the world. And he also learns some things about himself and his past along the way.

For the film's performances,  we have a very talented cast with us, but unfortunately most of them seem perfectly happy to walk around this movie with bad English accents. McShane's accent is probably the least embarrassing accent in the film. But that is undoubtedly due to him actually being English so leave it to the professionals.   David Harbour as Hellboy is definitely the film's best performance. He has wit, he has attitude, he can be dramatic when he needs to be, and to all that he adds all-round likeability to his character that keeps you watching and for the most part entertained.

The film was written by Andrew Cosby, and this script holds very little back and goes all the way with just about anything you can do in these slightly edgier comic adaptations. From the first few minuets we get seemingly endless amounts of profanity, and a beyond-excretive amount of violence and gore.  Plus an unconventional narrator who doesn't seem to mind indulging in obscenities. Then there is the subplot of how humans feel about Hellboy and how he feels about them. The script does try to keep the main plot and subplot separate, so they may develop at their own pace, but it's when the two plots try to merge felt to me very convoluted and left me a bit confused.

The film was shot by Lorenzo Senatore. An acceptable job has been done with the cinematography, its not anything breathtaking. There's a battle at the start in black and white, which is interesting to admire as we don't get many things in black and white any more. Other than that it's just a lot of shots of city streets that many people are familiar with - except filled with monsters, and lots of blood.

The score was composed by Benjamin Wallfisch, who coincidentally just composed Shazam, which I have also just reviewed. Here it seems he is trying to make a soundtrack that fits the tone of the film with some moments of very loud and hard rock music, but also allowing himself the opportunity to try some other things along the way which gave the score a nice feeling of variety about it.

Now I shall move on to the flaws, one of which is that this film at times is far too loud - whether it's a fight scene and things are falling all over the place, or the use of rock music has got out of hand to the point of being nothing more than disturbingly loud.

Here is my other issue, I feel like this film has an over-reliance on gore. Many movies based on comics have had their fair share of gore and violence, but there was always a balance to make time for the story and characters to develop. With this film there is no feeling of balance and the gore nearly becomes exploitative.

What I draw from this is that Hellboy has one good key performance out of a huge number of bad ones, a script working too hard to cover too much, a few interesting visuals worth admiring and a score that will largely rest on your tolerance of heavy rock. And lastly it suffers shamelessly from being far too loud in certain places and choosing gore over things that would give the film at least a little more quality than it has.

Having taken all my pros and cons into account, I'm going to give Hellboy
C+
Thank you for reading.