Photo Credit: Marmolejo1489 via Wikipedia Commons
By Richard Heaton
Hellboy is a very different kind of film from others released throughout the year. It’s a little action, weird fantasies, and a whole lot of crazy all boiled down into around two hours.
It’s very rare to find a film that isn’t for everyone; if someone doesn’t like comedies, they would still at least be entertained by a comedy film. Hellboy is one of the exceptions, because it’s not for everybody but tailored towards a very specific group of fans.
Even if you are a fan of the comics or even saw the old Ron Pearlman Hellboy films, the newest reboot might still end up being a bit too much to handle. It has some solid humor and great acting from some of the films stars, but a lot of the action and violence is very over the top.
It’s like every couple minutes you see someone die in a way you never thought possible, and each death is more gruesome and disturbing than the last.
I saw the film in Dolby, which makes the sounds more intense, and the person who was sitting to my left kept reacting like it was a crazy horror film and it kind of was.
I’m used to these kinds of outrageous films, I saw Army of Darkness a bunch of times, but a lot of this film was too bloody and disturbing. So only viewers who like that kind of action would fully enjoy the film, while the average viewer would end up cringing more than a couple times.
Hellboy is just as thrilling as it is disturbing. There are a lot of action scenes that are just so grand and jaw-dropping. There’s a long scene where Hellboy is battling some giants and it’s very intense and cool looking, despite also having a few gross moments.
As for the acting, David Harbour plays the titular Hellboy, but the real star of the show is Milla Jovovich. She plays the villain, a powerful sorceress, and she does a great job. Her performance is captivating and takes a small detour from what we usually see in modern villains.
When it came to Hellboy, David Harbour did an okay job. He can definitely pull off the look and most of the humor, but didn’t really pull off the acting as great as he could have.
The film was directed by Neil Marshall, who is mostly known for directing two episodes of Game of Thrones but other than that doesn’t have much on his resume. There were a few aspects of the film that were in fact inspired from his work with the show.
Overall, I feel like Hellboy is what you would get if you took a film like Deadpool and had it directed by Quentin Tarantino.
It was a good film, Jovovich’s performance and the colorful action sequences make the film fun but the over the top and disturbing scenes coupled with poor dialogue choices really affect the film. Still a fun film and I would give it a score of 70 out of 100.
