Hellboy

A demon turns down jaffa cakes. A scouser "fuckin' hates iron". A bloke gets his face pulled off his skull. Little Mo sprays a pig and a goddess with MP5 bullets. A very famous English wizard sports a very familiar Dublin accent. A soul is literally punched out of a zombie. Just some of the treats awaiting you in this Neil Marshall directed reboot of Mike Mignola's comic book. It's not the all out disaster people have been calling it but it's not a patch on Guillermo Del Toro's adaptions from a few years back.

Hellboy (David Harbour) is the world's most famous paranormal investigator. He's an unusual looking fella. Large, red, 2 filed off horns growing out of his head, huge fist. He's hard to miss. He works for his father Trevor (Ian McShane) at the bureau of paranormal research and defense and he's been sent to England to help out in the fight against the supernatural. While he's there a demon called Gruagach (Stephen Graham) wants revenge against him for a past slight and in doing so threatens to bring about the end of the world.

This was a bit of fun in places. It's always nice to see a comic book film that isn't afraid to be gory and gruesome and far from family friendly. Jaws are ripped off, tongues are eaten, giants are battled, Londoners are dismembered by the dozen. It's crunchy, it's gooey, it's entertainingly silly but it's impossible to shake that feeling, the bang of deja vu, the annoyance that's it's all been done before and with loads more panache, imagination and far more likable characters. Like Spiderman and Batman and Superman before it this is Hellboy's turn for a reboot and once again it just doesn't live up to what came before.

This was supposed to be Hellboy 3, a follow up to Guillermo Del Toro's fun 2004 original and masterful 2008 sequel but for reasons unknown (to me) Del Toro wasn't offered directorial duties on part 3 and with him gone star Ron Perlman noped out too. After this it was decided to restart the series and so Neil Marshall took over. Marshall's a safe pair of hands, with a few great genre movies (Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Doomsday) behind him and of course the Blackwater Bay episode of Game Of Thrones. Star David Harbour is well loved from Netflix's Stranger Things. It should have been a golden combo. Harbour's Hellboy is pleasingly gruff and Marshall's bloody action scenes will make you grin but then you start recognising stuff you'll have seen before that played out exactly the same way. There's being reverential to the source material and then there's just having no imagination at all. If you're going to reboot something change things up a little. Or at least lob a few enjoyable characters around for us to remember.

Here Hellboy gets saddled with a godawful pair. Daniel Dae Kim's Ben and Sasha Lane's Alice. 2 American actors with faux English accents so shite you'll long for the days of Dick Van Dyke's cheeky chimney sweep. Lane especially is so bad that she hamstrings nearly every scene she's in. She was so good in 2015's American Honey. Her role here obliterates any bit of goodwill from that. At least the always reliable Ian McShane as Poppa Hellboy will save the day right? Nah. He turns up, he's good but he's hardly used at all. Why hire an actor of his calibre and then only give him 5 minutes of screentime? But no one comes to these films for the acting I hear you say?? Piffle, look back on Hellboy 1 & 2. 2 films packed with heart, and a cast with chemistry to burn playing off each other brilliantly. Here, apart from one early scene of father and son there's none of that and as a result you don't give a fig about anyone. 

This could have been special. A part 3 that could have blown the Marvel films away. But it's a cynical cash grabbing reboot instead. The blood and guts (how this isn't rated 18 is beyond me) splashed so liberally around the screen will appeal to your baser instincts but the reality is that this will be forgotten the second Avengers : Endgame gets released next Wednesday midnight. Soon long Hellboy. I've a feeling we won't be seeing you again.