I Watch Films: Hellboy

Hellboy

They rebooted the Hellboy with a new director and new actors and they take it in a new direction. Hellboy is not a myth (people recognise him, and not just occult weirdos). He has approximately the same backstory as before – brought to Earth as a baby by Grigori Rasputin and some Nazis during WW2, doomed to destroy the world and rule over it. Instead adopted by Professor Broom and made into a monster hunter.

He's sent over to England where the Society Of Osiris needs help hunting three giants; in a nod to the earliest histories of the country, the giants were the original inhabitants, but now mostly sleep. It turns out that Queen Nimue, cut into pieces and buried in different locations, is being reassembled and Hellboy is a descendant of King Arthur, so the Society betray him.

Things get a bit complicated after that.

There’s some good setpieces and Hellboy makes some friends and makes some points about maybe monsters wouldn’t kill so many people if people didn’t hunt them all the time, which is nice, but like always he’s on the ragged edge of becoming demon-war-lord of the apocalypse and he’s the good monster so I don’t know about that.

Watch This: Some gritty fights with the unstoppable force that is Hellboy being put up against tougher, bigger and more complicated opponents
Don’t Watch This: A lot of gory, disjointed action with some wince-inducing eye-stabbing