tek's rating:

Hellboy (R)
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This is a 2019 reboot of the Hellboy franchise, which does not share a continuity with the 2004 and 2008 films. It did very poorly critically, and financially it barely did more than break even. Personally, I thought it was okay, but definitely not as good as the earlier films. I can't really put my finger on what made it less interesting, because generally I liked everything about it, just less so than the other movies. The action, the drama, the humor, etc. were all decent, just not great. And there's plenty of gore, which I'm not really into, but if you like that kind of thing, you should be satisfied with it, here. I don't believe there's anything actually wrong with the movie, but it's definitely not something I would feel the need to watch a second time.

Anyway, it begins in 517 A.D., when a witch named Nimue, aka the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich) releases a plague on England, just before being dismembered by King Arthur. Her body parts were put in locked chests and hidden in different places throughout the country. But she wasn't dead, just incapacitated. In the present, a boar-like changeling named Gruagach, who bears a grudge against Hellboy (David Harbour), collects the pieces of Nimue's body and brings them together. A coven of witches help restore her body, and then she has to recover her lifeblood from the tree where she was defeated centuries ago. Meanwhile, Hellboy tries to stop her, with help from a medium named Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane) and a soldier from a group called M11 named Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim). And there's a fair amount of drama between Hellboy and his adoptive father, Professor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane), the leader of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, for which Hellboy works.

A lot of other stuff happens, including a battle with giants, a meeting with Baba Yaga, a flashback to Hellboy's origins, which involved Nazis and Rasputin and a Nazi-hunter called Lobster Johnson (Thomas Haden Church). And I assume a lot of the monsters in the movie must have been CGI. But I don't want to get into all the details of the film; I'm leaving out a ton, actually. Anyway, of course the good guys win in the end. There's also a fun mid-credits scene with the ghost of Lobster Johnson, and a post-credits scene with Baba Yaga. I doubt there'll ever be a sequel, but if there was, I would watch it.


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