Hellboy (2019)

Saw the 2019 reboot of Hellboy.  It was widely hated and is an inferior movie, but it's fairly spectacular and not that bad.  Let me start with the strengths:  The film feels more serious and is amazing to look at.  There's a lot of visual stuff to see and the apocalyptic climax features surreal, amazing creatures which evoke the majestic weirdness of Wayne Barlowe or Peter Mohrbacher.  Just great stuff.

Okay, let's move on to the bad: the film feels much more gritty.  Gone is any kind of humanity and humor from the series, replaced by frowny-faced growling and CGI-heavy grotesques.  In the Del Toro films, Hellboy is put-upon and weary, but fundamentally an okay guy.  Here, his crustiness curdles into toxic masculinity as his father urges him to "grow a pair."  The sparingly used profanity and irony of the originals becomes so overused that it's unusual for a fairytale monster not to be spewing profanity as Hellboy fights them.  It's very nice to look at, but it's dower and grim.  Also, there's a ton of eye-gouging for some reason.

Also, the morality is way more clear this time.  The film (more or less) follows the plot Del Toro planned on for the third film: Hellboy is forced to choose between humankind and monsterkind in an apocalyptic showdown.  This seems really interesting because it forces a crisis in the metaphor of Hellboy as outsider.  In the original films, he's easily a stand-in for any minority: forced to live in hiding, feared by the public even as he supports them, and given great and unspecified powers.  If he's being forced to choose between them, it feels like a lose-lose situation.  Can't they co-exist?

Here however, all sympathy for the monsters is washed away.  All that is monstrous is hateful and ugly and cruel.  It is obvious what the right choice is.  The only remaining thing to wonder is if Hellboy will turn out to be Good or Evil and which way that will go was obvious from the start.  I think that's where the hatred for this film comes from.  Again, this film is not that bad - I've definitely sat through worse - but this film feels like a betrayal of the Del Toro films.

So, this film is for non-Hellboy fans only, it would seem.  It's entertaining, a bit dower and over-stuffed with lore, but pretty to behold and not terribly challenging.  Alas, it sort of makes a problematic mincemeat of the metaphors Del Toro built up.