The new Hellboy is a death-metal cover of Guillermo del Toro's work

There is a point in Neil Marshall Hellboy Reboot where a handful of demons are unleashed on Earth, and the audience can practically hear the film's special effects artists roll up their sleeves and scream. As the demons tear up crowds of screaming and terrified pbadersby, the film breaks up into a bloodbath. The bodies that are writhing are torn apart. The face of a man is torn. The moaning people are skewered on the legs of a traveling demon, and their heads explode in heavy damage. Why is this happening? What in the action that led up to that moment would justify what happens? Filmmakers do not seem particularly concerned about it. It's enough for them to have gallons of glittering CGI blood splattering the lens, turning the screen into a particularly bloody death metal album for a few vaguely justified moments.

This sequence is a particularly blatant statement of intent for Marshall. Hellboybut it's not the only one. From an initiation sequence in a scene of Tijuana luchador to at least half a dozen other bloody sequences where corpses are being hacked, broken and reduced to pieces of rubbery meat, the film seems to have been made by people who honestly feared that the MPAA vetting team could watch only one sequence, not see enough gore and give a PG-13 rating to the movie. The 2019 Hellboy looks like a metal cover version of previous Hellboy films from Guillermo del Toro. Mike Mignola's comic strips give the story the same central characters and basic ideas, but all the action has been accelerated and pushed to the extreme, as if it were meant to serve a younger audience, more rude and more angry.

The film begins with a return to the dark ages, as King Arthur (Mark Stanley) and Merlin (Brian Gleeson) confront an immortal and extremely powerful witch (Milla Jovovich) who claims to want humans and the monsters live together in a shared world. . Perhaps due to the fact that she pbades for "Vivienne Nimue, the Queen of Blood," Arthur and Merlin betray her and divide her into pieces, crushing the parts of her body and sending them to the confines from Britain, in a clear setting for a complicated fetch-quest. Today, some of Hellboy's worst enemies are joining forces to bring these elements together and bring Nimue together to end the human world.

One of the great peculiarities of Andrew Cosby's screenplay (which merges the stories of several Mignola comics arcs) is that all of this happens before the public has any idea of ​​who are these enemies or even who is Hellboy. The story regularly features characters like Hellboy's partner, Esteban (Mario de la Rosa), or his near-media-like knowledge, Alice Monaghan (American honey star Sasha Lane), with spontaneous references that suggest the audience already knows them from previous stories. This is an often confusing approach that can give viewers the feeling of watching a sequel to a movie they have never seen – except that ultimately, at oddly inappropriate moments, the film is heading towards the territory of flashback for fill gaps.

Photo: Mark Rogers / Lionsgate

Managed with more finesse, this approach may seem bold. It encourages the public to keep pace and does not bother him until he needs it. The problem is that these backtracks are almost all tedious and clumsy. The inevitable reason why Hellboy, a giant demon, grumpy, hard drinker, lives on the earth with a human father (Ian McShane) and fights supernatural wickedness with the Office of Paranormal Research and Defense. 39 a way that literally has a seer telling Hellboy his own story as well as he was not there for that. He has aspects of this story that he does not know and he is not happy to learn. But when she manages to tell everything by telling him seriously what has happened to her since her convocation on Earth, the film is lost in ridiculously awkward territory.

This is a recurring problem for a scenario that is of little interest, besides the many fight scenes and the wide variety of ways in which the human body can be turned into pressurized gore-spritzers. Mignola's comics have a sort of dark and majestic dignity, with their clean lines, their woodcuts and their discreet colors. The two cinematographic adaptations of Guillermo del Toro, 2014 Hellboy 2008 Hellboy II: the army of gold, presented his work as a dark carnival, an extremely complicated world filled with diverse and colorful creatures, often in a frenzied movement. Marshall's version is darker and messier, except when these arterial splashes of blood color the screen. It preserves the manic energy of sequences like Army of goldThe battle of the fairies of the teeth, but diffuse this tone in practically all the film.

Photo: Mark Rogers / Lionsgate

And in the space of two hours, the mania becomes exhausting and numb. Hellboy's biggest badet as a hero fighting monsters is that it's hard to hurt and heal quickly. Hellboy take the opportunity to constantly throw it through the walls and the floor, smash it, hit it with blades and subject it to a punishment that no human hero could bear. But if the action sequences can be exciting individually, the feeling that Hellboy and all his enemies are invulnerable is fundamentally invulnerable. Identical CGI constructs begin to appear and undermine any sense of stakes or drama.

Hellboy's call has always been based on his fragile humanity and his balance between his demonic nature and the way the world sees only the latter and the judge for that. It is a character conceived as a sensitive and relatable outsider, a hero whose internal struggles correspond to external struggles. But in this latest version of the character, internal fighting occurs only in the most brutal and described manner. Cosby's screenplay gives Hellboy good things to say about the feeling of being torn between his human world and his demonic heritage.

Photo: Mark Rogers / Lionsgate

But given the devotion of monsters to treat people as wet paper towels, any moral complexity in the film is just a rude, meaningless facade that anyone cares about what he says. Hellboy comes here as a heel of the WWE – sullen, sparkling, visibly simplistic and perhaps ripe for a moral turnaround, but not until the film has torn off all possible combat sequences.

And the film seems unusually determined to turn him into a clumsy head-to-head, a weak-minded, easily angry, easy-to-handle rube who grumbles, "Why does this book have so much words? "When asked to read, and turns into a sulky teenager every time he deals with his father, Ian McShane plays with a hideous contempt that treats a little less the treatment of his demon son adopted as a dog poorly trained. There is no reason Hellboy on the screen must be an intellectual story, and probably no mainstream action movie could retain the more scary and lonely tone that is found in Hellboy's animated adaptations like Sword of storms and Blood and iron. But there is also no reason for the series to be as acute and deafening, or as obsessed with the explosion of human corpses. The film's soundtrack, which includes songs by Mötley Crüe and Alice Cooper, is a return to an earlier era of metal. The rest gives the impression that it is the shallow version of a modern metal blanket – a version that increases volume and speed until words only matter as noise.