Hellboy review: an ugly, obnoxious and yowlingly witless reboot

Dir: Neil Marshall; Starring: David Harbour, Ian McShane, Milla Jovovich, Sasha Lane, Daniel Dae Kim, Stephen Graham. 15 cert, 121 mins.

“Stop! This isn’t you, Hellboy! You’re better than this!” bellows Ian McShane over the ambient din in this new adaptation of the cult Dark Horse comic book about a demonic secret agent with planed-down horns and a paranormal brief.

Admirers of the two existing, very fine and fairly recent Guillermo del Toro films inspired by the same series may well find themselves groaning in agreement.

While the del Toro Hellboys were postmodern Frankenstein fables, shining with pathos, fun and fairy-tale allure, this unsolicited reboot is ugly, obnoxious and yowlingly witless, with nothing to say for itself that doesn’t start with the letter F. It was directed by Neil Marshall, whose dark fantasy credentials were minted in his first two excellent features, Dog Soldiers and The Descent, and in his Game of Thrones episode Blackwater.

But those films’ merciless control and flair for slow-build terror are nowhere to be seen in this latest project, which unfolds in such a state of flailing disarray, one scene barely connecting to the next, it often feels as if the film is having a drunken fight with itself.

In place of the perfectly cast Ron Perlman, the new Hellboy is Stranger Things’s David Harbour, who can’t seem to force the character’s loveable bruiser personality through his Play-Doh prosthetics. His mission is to the thwart the comeback of Milla Jovovich’s cod-Arthurian sorceress, whose corpse has been in bits for centuries, but is currently being reassembled by an unpersuasive CG minotaur-boar-thing with the voice of Stephen Graham.

Some of the other monster designs are commendably horrid: I liked the crab-walking Baba Yaga and the giant skeleton briefly seen wading down the Thames. But the film is so unremittingly gruesome, shock soon stagnates into boredom, and you find yourself longing for a shot of del Toro’s humanity, or even just two scenes that smoothly connect.

McShane plays Hellboy’s adoptive human father, Professor Broom, and also provides voiceover narration, which he performs as if clapping eyes on the words for the first time in his life. Then part-way through, American Honey’s Sasha Lane starts tagging along as a telepathic sidekick, using a range of mysterious accents that, per Douglas Adams, are almost but not quite entirely unlike English.

“Psychic migraine. It’s like a car crash in my head. Something terrible happened here,” she warns as she and Hellboy reach the site of yet another grisly massacre – and again, as one, the audience thinks ‘yup’.