HELLBOY

★★ out of 5 Cast: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane Director: Neil Marshall Duration: 2h

Hellboy is an unholy mess. In what other movie does the protagonist ride an elevator from a fish and chips shop to a pocket dimension, there to meet Baba Yaga (voiced by Emma Tate, embodied by contortionist Troy James), a spindly hag who lives in a dilapidated wooden house atop giant chicken legs, feeds him cream-of-child soup, and tells him where to find Nimue, the villainous Blood Queen, who needs to visit the site of her 517 AD dismembering by King Arthur to regain her full powers and unleash a plague upon Britain?

That’s just one scene, mind you. And if you missed it you’d be none the worse off, since by this point in the movie we already know Nimue’s backstory and the fact that Hellboy, a demon-spawned superhero with a mean right hook, is on her trail.

Written by Andrew Cosby (TV’s Eureka) and directed by Neil Marshall (episodes of TV’s this, that and the other), Hellboy actually gets off to a rousing, even rip-roaring, start. The opening scene, set 1,500 years ago, introduces Milla Jovovich’s power-mad villain, and also serves notice that the violence will swing between cartoonish and gruesome, sometimes both at once. Imagine if the Looney Tunes coyote got crushed by a rock but bled out when it happened. Don’t bring the kids.

Next we meet Stranger Things’ David Harbour as Hellboy, taking over from Ron Perlman. I found Harbour’s Hellboy 20 per cent too quippy, but still a solid, dependable presence.

Dispensing with backstory, which the film doles out later in its endless (two-hour) run, we watch as Hellboy tries to save a friend who has been taken over by evil forces. It’s the first of many, many monsters he’ll meet, greet and defeat. Here’s a handy checklist: demons, fairies, changelings, vampires, leprous hags, luchadors, skeletons, giants, giant skeletons, witches, sorceresses, seers, dragons, dragonettes, Nazis, trolls, pig-monsters, were-cats, ectoplasmic entities and a giant, fire-breathing anemone.

Hellboy runs through this menagerie, sometimes in the company of his adoptive father (Ian McShane), sometimes with a sort of Doctor Who Companion type named Alice (Sasha Lane) and in the latter part of the movie with Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim), a British operative who may be secretly trying to kill him.

In fact, just about everyone in the movie is secretly trying to kill Hellboy at one point or another, thanks to a prophecy that says he’s going to bring about the end of the world. And he doesn’t help his case when he starts stomping around, complaining that monsters aren’t getting a fair shake, and that maybe the Blood Queen is misunderstood.

Marshall doesn’t seem ready to trust the audience to understand the movie, what with numerous scenes of driving where a quick cut would do, and an impressive number of inventive ways to make a blood-splatter noise.

There’s a good superhero movie lurking inside this Hellboy reboot — heck, there are probably two or three in there, and a shameless promise of a sequel to boot. But this film is intent on throwing everything it can on the screen, whether it all fits together or not. If you’re going to hell in a handbasket, perhaps best not to put all your eggs in there with you.

• cknight@postmedia.com
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