Hellboy, the big red goofball who put the Cult in Occult. I don't think anyone could have predicted how beloved Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Pearlman's take on the indie comic darling would become but it's for good reason, not the least of which was the pairing of director and subject matter. Del Toro is the current master of practical effects and monstrous imagery which created a world that was damn fun to be in. Considering how good the movie(s) were (fun fact: my very first written review was on Hellboy II: The Golden Army) and how perfect Ron Perlman was in the role it was quite a bit shocking when the reboot was announced with out big Ron in the lead. They had a twist up their sleeve and cast America's favorite small town sheriff and current twitter darling David Harbour, ok...I'm interested. Show me what you got...
Today they answered that call and dropped the first official trailer for the upcoming Hellboy and, well.... I'm just not feeling it. I'm easy to impress with a trailer. Throw together some 80's pop, funny lines, and action packed cuts and you can almost guarantee my butt in a pleather reclining theater seat. Needless to say I'm somewhat surprised by how much I'm not onboard with this flick after watching. It's got nothing to do with any allegiance to the OG film crew, it has more to do with bad make-up and effects. David Harbour comes off as the right kind of sarcastic bad-ass but the face prosthesis are just too much. They're so thick it's like he's wearing a rubber mask, no facial movement at all, like the worst botox job you can imagine. Couple in the CGI which, while possibly not 100% complete, looks far too cartoonish. I really don't get the varying degrees of CGI quality in top-tier Hollywood films today. I mean, someone explain how you can have a Marvel film be almost totally photo-realistic, while DC movies end up looking like high priced cartoons. It doesn't make sense, one process works, the other doesn't....can the other. Sadly, it looks like Hellboy went with brand X for their visual effects and the result is a movie that looks and feels more like the latest Resident Evil film (I see you Milla) then the start of a blockbuster franchise (yes, I realize RE is a blockbuster franchise, but you get what I'm saying).
I hope, I really really hope, that this is a case of one bad trailer and what comes next makes me eat my words. Hellboy's world is so ripe for the filming it's ridiculous and I've been craving more stories from this universe since The Golden Army.
Check it out below and let us know what you think, am I totally off base here?
HELLBOY hits theaters April 19, 2019
