I heard about this movie some time ago but completely forgotten about it until few days ago when I saw the poster in the coming soon section on Indonesia's biggest cinema chain website. Without any prior notification or trailer shown earlier, it suddenly popped out of nowhere and premier on last Wednesday. But since me and my wife were already invited to screening of new movie in another cinema, we postponed seeing this until yesterday. Well now we should get on with the movie.
Brief Story Line
Hellboy (David Harbour - Stranger Things TV series, A Walk Among the Tombs etc) was a creature with super strength and working for Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) to solve supernatural cases and fight against dangers they created. Hellboy's superior was also his adoptive father Trevor (Ian McShane - Deadwood TV series, John Wick: Chapter 2 etc). This time Hellboy was given a very difficult and dangerous assignment as he had to face against an immortal & powerful witch called Nimue (Milla Jovovich - Resident Evil series, Future World etc) who tried to destroy the world and humans in it while giving the demons chance to rule the earth.
With the support from a beast with pig's head called Gruagach (Stephen Graham), Nimue managed to wreak havoc in England where Hellboy was assigned. As Trevor was worried Hellboy would be overwhelmed, he also assigned an MI-11 agent named Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim - Lost and Hawaii Five-O TV series etc). And with the addition of a young psychic named Alice (Sasha Lane - American Honey etc), they all went out to fight against Gruagach, Nimue and her army.
So how would the story conclude? Find them all in this gore and really violent supernatural superhero movie.
End of Brief Story Line
When I read about Hellboy reboot where it would have an R rating, I was actually pretty excited. But as I said above, due to very little publicity, it did not garner the hype and excitement it was supposed to get. Before we saw this movie yesterday, my wife told me that some of the people she knew who had seen it, mentioned the Indonesian censor was very rough. And sadly it was true. There were many scenes where the censorship body deemed to be too violent were cut, which resulted to a displeasure on us. I felt a bit cheated as the scenes where they were supposed to be the main attraction of R rating movie were not shown.
Now the movie itself was actually having a rather confusing way of story telling. Firstly we were shown a mature Hellboy and audience were expected to know and understand his power and why he worked in the BPRD, only to be given some brief explanation in the middle of the movie. And such brief flash back was not only once but few times, which was quite bemusing. My wife commented that she felt the movie was like missing parts or scenes that were purposely not shown but we must understand them by ourselves.
The action sequence were pretty awesome, but due to the abrupt cutting in certain scenes, we felt it was dissatisfying. It was liked we were teased and just when we were about to see the climax, it was cut and moved on to another scene. I really do not understand the reason for such cut, seeing that there had been various R rating movies in the past shown in Indonesia that did not have to endure the kind of censor, such as Deadpool 2 and its predecessor or the Indonesian movies like Headshot and other similar Iko Uwais films. It would have been probably better if they just classify this movie under D21+ to avoid such cut instead of D17+.
The sound effects were fantastic, which was one of the very few pluses of our experience. And the make up effects were also terrific. David Harbour's face really looked like a tough version of Hellboy and his performance was quite convincing with his wisecrack jokes. Oh Daniel Dae Kim's character was also a nice surprise. Meanwhile the rest of the characters were just so so to my personal opinion. Of all the fights in the movie, my most favorite was the one where Hellboy fought against 3 creatures at the same time, although the cut scene also ruined the moment.
I actually had seen the original 2004 version of Hellboy, as well as its 2008 sequel and I pretty much enjoyed them. Both of them were fun movies and felt light but the fight scenes and special effects were awesome. The characters were also enjoyable to see, especially Abe Sapien as Hellboy's partner/sidekick. Ron Perlman's characterization of Hellboy was a gentle & caring version, as opposed to the really violent Harbour. There were no light characters and the violence were a lot more gruesome & gore in the 2019 version which might not be to the liking of fans from that original movie. For me personally, I thought the change of tone was a good and interesting idea. However, the inconsistent (and rather confusing) story telling was a minus for me and I could certainly understand the critics' very low rating. Plus obviously the censors really ruined the experience for me and my wife.
Overall this would probably be a better movie to be seen through online streaming without the cutting. If you are fans of the light & very humorous Hellboy and not a fan of too much gore scenes, then this version would definitely be your least favorite. Not to mention if you like to see a movie with very good story telling. However, if you just want to see Hellboy fighting demons & creatures violently, and you do not mind the way the movie was told, then this probably could satisfy you. Btw, there was 1 mid and 1 post end credit scenes in the movie, in case you want to wait and see till the end of 119 minutes duration. Those scenes might be prepared for a sequel, though I highly doubt it would have, seeing the movie seemed to be performing disappointingly in terms of box office.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Notes:
Hellboy was a character from Dark Horse comics where some of their well known published works included Sin City, Timecop, Umbrella Academy etc.
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