Hellboy (2019)

“The treatment of race in Hellboy could be seen as a minor bright spot.”

Title: Hellboy (2019)
Director: Neil Marshall 👨🏼🇬🇧
Writers: Screenplay by Andrew Cosby 👨🏼🇺🇸 based on the comics by Mike Mignola 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Andrew 👨🏻🇺🇸🌈

Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 2/5

Hellboy, like its two predecessors from 2004 and 2008, is an action-packed affair with abundant allusions to history, mythology, and the occult. The reboot, directed by Brit Neil Marshall (Game of Thrones) and starring David Harbour (Stranger Things), struggles to live up to the reputation of the award-winning comic book series on which it’s based.

Plotwise, a lot is packed into Hellboy. This ultimately is a double-edged sword. We get a lot of action to keep us entertained but room is left for quality character development or nuance. First, we meet the Blood Queen Nimue (Milla Jovovich), who is summarily quartered by King Arthur (Mark Stanley) all the while swearing vengeance on humanity somehow and sometime in the future. The powerless-yet-still-animated pieces of the Blood Queen’s body are then scattered across England. Fast forward to the present: We find Hellboy (Harbour) looking for a friend at a luchador fight in Tijuana. We’re told he was his tequila drinking buddy, which apparently is enough to explain the locale. Chaos ensues; it turns out his friend has been possessed by a demon—the first clue that things are cosmically amiss. Hellboy is summoned back to HQ by his father Professor Broom (Ian McShane), who tells him that dark forces seek to bring the Blood Queen back by reuniting her body parts and that it’s up to Hellboy to stop this. On his way, Hellboy manages to gather two sidekicks, Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane) and Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) to help. All hell breaks loose (quite literally) and London is engulfed for a time by hellfire and demons. A final showdown in St. Paul’s Cathedral concludes with good triumphing over evil.

Visually, Hellboy plays to its comic book roots with hyper-saturated color and leans heavily on CGI to render gore and fantastical beasts. At times, these effects seem well suited to the movie, but more often than not, the effects seem overwrought or too obvious. Numerous scenes felt more like storyline content from a console RPG rather than a blockbuster movie.

Much of the movie’s script is firmly tongue-in-cheek, with one-liners and sight gags interspersed throughout, a hallmark of the Hellboy series. These keep the movie light and somewhat entertaining, despite some of its darker and gorier moments. However, they aren’t enough to salvage a predictable plot, perfunctory acting, and a couple of questionable British accents.

Gender: 2/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES, but barely

“Christ! Not another secret boys club!” -Alice Monaghan

At the end of the day, for all its smart allusions to history and mythology, Hellboy is an action movie on par with other action blockbusters, in which gender diversity feels like an afterthought. While several prominent female characters exist, they do not exceed their purpose as plot devices or as stock characters. Indeed, we have the evil (yet beautiful) villain, the Blood Queen; the trusty, charming sidekick, Alice Monaghan; the evil (and grotesque) Baba Yaga (Emma Tate); and the graceful oracle Lady Hatton (Sophie Okonedo).

While character development may not seem like a natural thing to look for in an action movie, it’s important to note that Hellboy, Professor Bruttenholm, and Ben Daimio are given ample backstory, allowing the audience more context to understand their motivations. This same is not afforded the female characters. While together they garner significant screen time, they had virtually no character development aside from Alice, whose backstory only helps to connect the dots and move the plot along.

Despite the relative abundance of women, only once in the almost two hours of runtime do they engage in conversation. That conversation does not occur until more than halfway through the movie, lasts about 30 seconds, and is about the betrayal of one witch (Penelope Mitchell) against the Blood Queen.

Race: 4/5

Before filming started, Hellboy had already garnered significant attention due to the casting and then re-casting of one of the main characters, Major Ben Daimio. Ed Skrein, a white British actor, was originally cast to play Daimio but stepped down to make way for Daniel Dae Kim when it was pointed out Daimio is of Asian descent in Hellboy comic book canon. This was a positive moment in avoiding the whitewashing of a character originally written as a person of color.

The film’s treatment of race could be seen as a minor bright spot. While the movie does steer into some stereotypes about Mexico in the early fight scene set in Tijuana, once the plot moves to the United Kingdom, the casting adequately reflects the demographics of modern Britain. Several of the main protagonists are people of color, with African American and Maori actor Sasha Lane playing Alice, Korean American actor Kim playing Ben Daimio, and biracial (Jewish and Nigerian British) actor Sophie Okonedo playing Lady Hatton. Being mainly set in the UK, a country dealing with it’s own race and diversity issues, it was interesting to see the casting of people of color in seemingly upper-class roles. These included the members of the English hunting club being South Asian and Black Britons, Okonedo’s role as Lady Hatton, and even Kim’s decidedly (albeit not terribly believable) RP pronunciation. It’s clear that a concerted effort was made to cast these roles with an eye towards diversity—not just through race, but socioeconomically as well.

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.67/5

Hellboy is not groundbreaking by any means, nor is it the absolute worst. It features enough fantastical gore and lighthearted gags to keep the audience entertained as it moves through the plot, but no real surprises or highlights to make it stand out from any other big-budget action blockbuster released in the past two decades.

Like many other action movies, diversity and representation don’t seem to have factored into the thinking or development of Hellboy aside from some notable casting choices. However, Hellboy’s numerous references to mythology and history, from Arthurian legend, to Slavic folklore, to monsters straight out of Flemish Renaissance hellscapes, does hold interest beyond most other movies in its genre.

Like Hellboy? Try these other comic book blockbusters from 2019.

Grade: CLiApril 12, 2019