Reboots are on the agenda when Hollywood doesn't know what to produce. If a production was allowed to celebrate a success, then either sequels were produced or it is rebooted. The producers then justify this by saying that it is a newer version and that it is often sold in such a way that it has to be better. But is that really the case?
The Story:
1500 years ago, the master witch Nimue was defeated by King Arthur, then cut up and her body parts were hidden all over the world in secret monasteries. But the witch's servants have found the body parts and have recovered them piece by piece to resurrect their master.
Hellboy, who is on a job in Great Britain, gets into an ambush and is saved by the medium Anna. There they both learn about their past and M-11 agent Ben joins them. Together the triple tries to stop Nimue, who has her own plan with Hellboy to rule the world...
My Opinion:
After only 10 years a new Hellboy? Does it really have to be? Yes, it happened. The only question is, why didn't they do a third part instead of rebooting the whole thing? That would have done the brand far more good. Especially since the previous 2 parts of the Guillermo del Toro version were really good. But surely, the makers wanted something fresh, new, and also that it would be something different. You can definitely understand that. Because Hellboy is a character who has to be bloody. That was missing from the versions of del Toro.
And the fact that the new version is just about this aspect, the film already shows us in its first scene, when a crow picks an eye out of a corpse. No question, the film is very bloody and very true to the comic and the real Hellboy. Furthermore, the new Hellboy, played by David Harbour, the sheriff from the Stranger Things series, isn't much different form the previous one. The red latex suit as Hellboy suits him well and gives the comic character some charisma, which should be mentioned, but otherwise this new Hellboy oftentimes seems lost.
You can really see Hellboy in many parts of the movie, where he looks out of place. Sometimes he looks like a big clumsy guy just waiting to break something. I don't know, maybe that's the way it should be, maybe Neil Marshall wanted to give his version of the hellish boy that so that he doesn't look like the previous one.
Neil Marschall is actually a director who is known to make thrilling movies, like The Descent for example, which really pulls on the nerves of the viewer. But with Hellboy, there is no tension for such a movie. The movie is r-rated and quite brutal and with a lot of blood, but the movie is missing something.
The new Hellboy movie is very strange, sometimes even weird and the jokes are very peculiar. In any case, the movie needs getting used to. Maybe that's because we are used to another Hellboy, but it takes some time to get used to the movie.
Also, the scenes and dialogues sometimes seem to be set up and you already know in advance what's going to happen, because it's so obvious. Some SFX and CGIs are not round and you can see that e.g. the giant trolls are animated or on some places the wild boar monster, or when Nimue is at the top of the hill where she gets her energy back out of her tree of life and speaks to her subjects and creatures.
Again and again the film tries to build up an atmosphere, to give you a feeling of a fairy tale in reality, but it fails again and again. Also the own character of the film with first action, then exposure only ignites the first time and gets boring afterwards, because the narrative remains the same.
Hellboy - Call of Darkness is a movie that didn't have to be done. I think the film served Neil Marshall around something to experementiate, because closed and rounded looks different. The movie has a lot of flaws, it lacks in depth, the dialogues are very weak, the CGI is not convincing, the music is really very bad and doesn't tune the viewer into the movie, the scene and what happens, it is quite the opposite, sometimes you think, WTF, what's this track supposed to be?
All in all the FIlm is definitely wasted potential and I would have preferred a third and final part of the del Toro version of Hellboy than this experiment.
Hellboy - Call of Darkness got from me on IMDb only generous 5 stars out of 10, if I could I would love to rate it with 4.7 stars.
