nicolascagegoons
Watched Sep 13, 2025
Rating

One of the more messy cbm of the 2010s.

Its not inherently a bad film on paper, its got a decent story and characters but how they executed it is a whole nother story.
See, it wants to be this big action film but also be a sort of deadpool-esk comedy flick but also a drama with character arcs but also a science fiction film.
And when you don't do any of them good besides maybe the part of being a sci fi film.

First of all, i have never read a hellboy comic but I do love the del Toro films and i don't hate the hellboy film from last year but this version of hellboy seems to prioritize him making one liners over getting serviceable stakes in the story because his arc is haphazardly done.
Why does the blood queen effect his personal stakes here?
It doesn't make sense. His fight earlier with the 3 trolls obviously should have been the main cog in the machine that should've thrown his arc into action but it doesn't.

Oh yeah and while I'm on that specific part of the film, that specific fight scene has hellboy composed very badly against not only the terrain he's walking on but also the background itself and the fully cg characters.

I do, like the other hellboy films, like the creature designs(at least most of them) and the makeup for hellboy but other then hellboy(and also the baby yaga who has a cool look), every other creature is done with vfx which isn't a problem on its own but the vfx threwout most of the film, look pretty bad.
There are some decent shots of cgi but most of it is buried under shite.

David Harbour tries his best and I think he gives a decent performances, so does Ian mcshane, the writing gives them not allot to work with but they did their best.
The other performances are completely forgettable at best tho.
The blood queen herself is a pretty lame villain. She's isn't threatening and there is no personality.
The type of villain that wants to "destroy the world" is a very hard character to get right imo because you have to able to make them menacingly worthy for being such a threat but also give them a personality or motivation that make them standout which allot of examples don't and this one is no different.

The fight choreography is honestly pretty decent besides, again, the troll fight. Allot of the choreography is not held back by bad vfx.

Hellboy 2019 is a failure in most ways but its not entirely worthless.
There was passion, sadly it was muddled under studio meddling.

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