Review: I respect that this movie was trying to do something completely different from the previous Hellboy movies, but the film ends up being little more than a complete mess.
This movie manages to be both bland and extremely unpleasant to watch at the same time. The blandness comes from the characters themselves. Hellboy teams up with two other characters to stop the villain. One is his friend and one doesn't trust him. Unfortunately that is their whole personalities. The villain herself is an extremely bland villain and one I feel like I have seen a thousand times already (The Kid Who Would Be King (Hellboy in many ways seems to have a surprising amount in common with that movie with the exception of that movie being good), Thor: Ragnarok, Suicide Squad etc.). More than that her entire motivation seems to be that she is the bad guy. Hellboy himself is your typical guy who looks like a monster, but has a good heart and people misunderstand him character with little more to him that we have not seen a million times. His father is your typical seems like a jerk dad that ends up to really love his son but is unable to show it. None of this is helped by a bland story that is rushed and cliché. The unpleasantness comes from the R rating itself. Unlike the Deadpool movies which used their R rating for their own wicked sense of humor, this movie simply seems to use its R rating to throw in as much cussing and gore as possible. The problem is the movie puts the cussing and gore in the forefront even in front of the story. The gore is extremely over the top and constant. This gore adds nothing to the atmosphere of the film or the story. With this it is simply disgusting and unpleasant to look at, but nothing else.
The reason this movie gets a "D-" instead of an "F" is because of one sole good scene. This is the scene with Baba Yaga. This scene is darkly funny, very atmospheric and legitimately scary. This is everything the rest of the movie wants to be but isn't. It also shows how an R rating for this movie could have worked instead of hampering the film as it did everywhere else in the movie.
Simply avoid this movie.
-Michael J. Ruhland
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