This Hellboy is not the Hellboy you want to see. That’s the 2004 Guillermo Del Toro version, currently streaming on Hulu. The version on Netflix is Neil Marshall’s 2019 reboot, and its current Rotten Tomatoes score of 17% from critics suggests it’s more hellish than any of the monsters it features.
Hellboy (2019): the monster movie that feels like a rice cake
Even the film magazines, which often try to say something nice about films they don’t like, had trouble with this. rich gave it two out of five stars and said that while “the new Hellboy promises to be a gritty, witty look-no-shits version of Mike Mignola’s Demon Detective,” it’s “a promise that isn’t quite kept.” While David Harbor (Stranger things) does a good job of stepping into Ron Perlman’s gigantic shoes: “Harbour is brilliant. Everyone around him: less so.”
It’s “a mess of a movie”, Bloody disgusting say. ‘This doesn’t quite feel like the Hellboy we wanted, but it feels like a throwback to all things ’90s horror, complete with not-so-great CG and over-the-top monsters.” Salon.com says that “looking at the Hellboy restarting is like eating a rice cake: you don’t feel bad afterwards, but at the same time you’re not quite sure if you’ve really experienced anything.”
While critics are almost unanimous that the reboot isn’t a patch on the Del Toro films, that doesn’t mean none of them enjoyed it. It’s “absolutely insane nonsense,” he says CNET, “and if you like that kind of thing, great fun”. But according to Jennifer Heaton from Alternative lens: “Hellboy want to be Deadpoolbut in execution it is much closer Suicide squad. It’s cynical and unfocused, and clearly pieced together from a production amid chaos.”