Hellboy

★1/2 

Ugggghhhh. With leaden jokes, lame CGI, and so much blood-splattering gore that it soon grows tedious, Hellboy is not just the reboot that no one was asking for, but an instant contender for 2019’s worst film.

Guillermo del Toro, last seen winning an Oscar for a fish-fucking movie, first brought Hellboy to screen in 2004. As is del Toro’s way, he depicted its devilish anti-hero and his team-up peeps in the Bureau For Paranormal Research as the whimsical players in a dark, stylised fairy-tale. Enough people cared that there was a sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, released in 2008, right at the end of those innocent days when comic book adaptations were still a Hollywood sideline, not the centre of the industry.

This latest Hellboy film was initially conceived as another sequel, but, eventually, as the production wheels ground on, things turned back to the start. So, 15 years after last time, we take it from the top, and get the same origin story served up again; this time, with Stranger Things bro David Harbour wearing the filed-down horns. Nazi scientists raise a beast from hell in hopes of enacting evil, only for it to turn into some generic anti-heroic dude-with-’tude, who uses his murderous talents to hunt down mythical/magical bad guys. Whilst there’s still unfunny one-liners and quote-unquote “‘ball-busting banter’” herein, at least, with this Hellboy, he doesn’t chomp on a cigar.

This Hellboy is helmed by Neil Marshall, last seen on big screens with 2010’s lame cod-300 historical-fight-club slog Centurion. He’s spent the years, since, helming episodes for large-scale TV franchises: Game Of Thrones, Hannibal, Westworld, and, speaking of reboots no one was asking for, Lost In Space.

Marshall’s best film, by far, is his 2006 spelunking nightmare The Descent, which expertly leveraged tension by employing a very simple, very cheap device: darkness. Here, in Hellboy, there’s a complete absence of tension, no singular action sequence that manages to capture a sense of momentum and build. Its showstopper, show off moment is a stitched together faked-one-shot in which Hellboy fights a trio of CGI giants, and the non-existent camera flies around. There’s no weight, no stakes, no gravity, no sense of spatial awareness; it’s like being stuck in some computer animation demo, with no escape.

Feeling stuck is, indeed, how your old pal Film Carew felt for most of this Hellboy’s two hours; which involve King Arthur, a witch whooshing a visual ‘plague’ out of her hands, TV news reports as exposition, a running ‘joke’ about Hellboy’s hands cracking mobile phone screens, Sasha Lane trying on an… Irish? accent, an incalculable body count, a giant sky beam, the fate of the world in the balance, and our anti-hero receiving, during the climactic fight, an inspirational beyond-the-grave speech telling him to “grow a pair”.

The nadir of this disaster is probably when some giant pig-monster fairy with a Yorkie accent calls a Benedictine monk a “gobshite” before tearing his face off. Those who’re fond of seeing people and/or monsters have faces, limbs, or bodies ripped off/apart are in luck, as are those who like seeing people and/or monsters get stabbed in the eye or impaled.

It’s a film obviously conceived as a gorefest; a reminder that Marshall’s debut, the genuinely idiotic Dog Soldiers, essentially staged a throwback to the Video Nasty era. Yet, all Hellboy’s endless moments of splatter have none of the charm of the no-budget genre-work, given they’re CGI creations made on a large budget dime. The overall effect is, essentially, like combining the worst elements of early and late period Peter Jackson: mixing goofball B-movie juvenilia with lifeless digital showreel spectacle. That there’s more of the former than the latter means this isn’t, like, Hobbit-level horrible, but that’s the ultimate backhanded compliment. Hellboy is still bad. Real bad.

Missing Link

★★1/2

Missing Link is a film that was clearly born of a pitch meeting premise. What if a cryptozoological adventurer discovered that the Sasquatch really existed, only it turned out not to be a monster, but an English speaker that’s timid, awkward, and comically maladroit in social situations? It’s a simple idea, something that sounds like a comedy show sketch. In Chris Butler’s film — the latest for Laika animation — the idea is drawn out to 90 minutes. There’s many adventures piled upon this initial premise, but it all feels like scaffolding on the original idea; a forest that can’t camouflage the central presence of a single germinating seed.

Hugh Jackman voices the buffoonish adventurer, an ‘Englishman abroad’ in the early 20th century, out the uncover myths, lost cities, fantastical creatures. Zach Galifianakis voices the bigfoot figure, who is essentially a vessel for ongoing fish-out-of-water comedy; he’s human-like, but understands no social mores, no figures of speech. They end up in a travelling trio with a fiery, free-spirited widow voiced by Zoe Saldana, on the road to Shangri-la, an edenic Himalayan paradise populated by snowmen who may or may not be abominable. They’re pursued by a couple of antagonists caricaturised as pure villains: both Timothy Olyphant’s Old West bounty hunter and Stephen Fry’s old-boys-club explorer exist only to obsessively try and thwart our main party, flying into fits of rage when they don’t. They have no other motivations or characteristics, and are easily the weakest points of a not-particularly-strong film.

Laika earnt plenty of praise for their stop-motion animated aesthetic with Coraline and Kubo & The Two Strings, and there are moments, in Missing Link, where their animated rendering of water, or steam, or swirling mist is genuinely beautiful. Butler, cinematographer Chris Peterson, and their team of animators manage to make different locations — smog-ridden London, emerald Washingtonian forests, California ranch houses, Himalayan villages, fantastical ice castles — have distinctly different visual looks, colour palettes, and qualities of staged ‘light’. But, ultimately, all this is in service of a minor idea, an elemental story, and a handful of pretty obvious jokes.