Ok I watched it so you don't have to, here we go.
Hellboy (2019) was a tedious bore. It basically rehashes Del Toro's vastly superior 2004 film but with a less interesting villain (they stole Suicide Squad's boring witch character).
The film tries to strike an irreverent tone with Hellboy constantly cracking wise and occasionally breaking the fourth wall but none of it works, the script just isn't clever and most of the humor fell flat or actively made me cringe.
One aspect of the film that could've improved on its predecessor is that it's rated R allowing for more tonally appropriate action, but the script treats this as an excuse to be as juvenile as possible inserting so many swears into the dialogue they just felt stilted and empty in delivery. Everyone ends up sounding like an edgy thirteen-year-old that reads at a 4th-grade level. The gore is much the same, it's used to excess lessening the sense of weight and stakes it might otherwise has had.
While all the characters are horribly written, David Harbour gives a solid turn as Hellboy despite this handicap, managing to exude enough charm to salvage some of the awful dialogue he’s given.
The one solid aspect of this film is the fight sequences, most of them are decently entertaining to watch as they fit with the quick pace and raw feel the film is going for. Even these suffer somewhat though from overuse of gore for gore’s sake and inconsistent effects that felt like the film was stretching its budget slightly beyond what it could realistically produce.
Overall the film was a trite, charmless, slog hurtling from one scene to the next, cramming exposition in where it can and constantly tripping over itself to get to the next fight. Despite an unrelenting pace, the film felt like it was three hours long and I was actively checking the time on my phone by the third act.
3/10 Hellish
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