Hellboy review: A lurid, confusing mess that's only partially redeemed by its tongue-in-cheek humour

As David Harbour's Hellboy jumps from one location to another and skips centuries, the plot makes less and less sense

Dir: Neil Marshall; Starring: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, Thomas Haden Church, Sophie Okonedo. Cert 15, 121 mins

British director Neil Marshall’s reboot of the Hellboy franchise is a lurid, confusing mess, only partially redeemed by its tongue-in-cheek humour and fitfully impressive visual effects.

The meandering, time-travelling plot opens in AD517 and closes in London in 2019. King Arthur puts in an appearance. So do the Nazis. We briefly catch a glimpse of Rasputin, the mad Russian monk. There are references to Alice in Wonderland and one scene involving Mexican wrestlers. The violence is so extreme and so stylised that it soon begins to resemble a Monty Python spoof of a Sam Peckinpah movie. Every few minutes, characters are decapitated or have their limbs lopped off or are impaled on sticks, swords, branches or any available poles. In their breaks, the heroes find time to eat fish and chips, fry up bacon, eggs and black pudding and to shave their horns.

Early on, King Arthur is shown tussling with Nimue, the Morgana Le Fay-like “Blood Queen” (Milla Jovovich in a deep crimson cape) who wants to wreak destruction on the world. She is “vengeance eternal”, which is another way of saying she is very hard to kill. If you chop her up into tiny little fragments and put her head in a box, she will simply try to reconstitute herself. Her neck doesn’t need to be attached to her body for her to talk. Ian McShane’s voice over tells us that this period in world history was known as the Dark Ages “for f***ing good reasons”.

We are quickly whisked hundreds of years forwards in time to Tijuana where Hellboy (David Harbour in the role originally played by Ron Perlman) is going about his business as an agent for Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence. He gets in a very bloody scrap with a masked wrestler. He’s a laid-back figure who keeps on wisecracking, even at the most lethal moments. The twist here is that he may inadvertently be the agent of global destruction. He is trying to save humanity at the same time Nimrue wants to enlist him in her diabolic schemes. In flashbacks, he discovers disturbing secrets about his own background. We see him as a little red-skinned foetus. People keep on telling him “evil is coming” and that he is the one bringing it.

As director Marshall showed in his “Battle of Blackwater Bay” episode of Game of Thrones, he knows how to stage action scenes. The film is full of big set-pieces in which the hero uses his gigantic fist to knock smithereens out of assorted giants, gremlins and demonic pigs. At one stage, Hellboy goes on a hunting trip with a bunch of British toffs from the secretive, upper-class “Osiris Club”. This may be a supernatural horror film but, at times like these, it plays like a cross between a story by PG Wodehouse and Roald Dahl.

Sasha Lane, the star of Andrea Arnold’s road movie American Honey, plays Alice, a young medium who gets “psychic migraines” and has an uncanny ability to vomit out the spirits of the recently deceased. She has known Hellboy since her earliest youth. In a flashback to London in 1992, we learn how Hellboy first encountered her and why he takes such an interest in her welfare. We also encounter Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim), a scarred special forces agent who keeps on injecting himself with a strange serum and tells dark stories about what happened to him on a mission in Belize.

Harbour plays Hellboy in an engagingly wistful way. He may be “devil’s spawn” but he has a little-boy-lost quality about him. This is most pronounced in his scenes with his adoptive father, Trevor Bruttenholm (McShane), to whom he is utterly devoted. Hellboy is a demon with a conscience becomes too emotional, Bruttenholm will tell him to “grow a pair” but the dad is equally besotted by him. As father and son commune, the film risks turning into a maudlin family melodrama.

In the final reel, a “giant blast of apocalypse” hits London. Tower Bridge is split in half as if it is made out of clay. Londoners going about their daily business are torn to pieces. If you enjoy kitsch, B-movie-style scenes of monsters running amok and of mass destruction, you’ll find these moments satisfactory enough. Like so much in the film, though, the scenes seem utterly random. They could have been filmed anywhere. As Hellboy jumps from one location to another, skips centuries and throws different historical and mythical figures into the same pot, it becomes more and more of a mish-mash and starts making less and less sense.