Hellboy (2019)

The 2019 Hellboy reboot arrives with the solemnity of a property that has been through several hands and none of them gentle. Neil Marshall directs David Harbour as the demon investigator, and the film spends its energy on giants, witches, and a Blood Queen who wants to end the world. The cast includes Daniel Dae Kim, Sasha Lane, and Sophie Okonedo in prominent roles. Ed Skrein withdrew from the Daimio role so an Asian actor could take it, and Daniel Dae Kim was cast. That decision registers as a genuine gesture at the production level. The film's narrative, however, does not pause to discuss it. There is no racial thesis here, no LGBTQ subtext, no climate lament, and no economic critique. The B.P.R.D. is a government agency played straight, with paperwork and jurisdiction and no suggestion that the rich should be eaten.

On the feminist front, Milla Jovovich's Nimue and Sasha Lane's Alice wield power, but the film offers no argument about gender. The villain's womanhood is incidental. Body positivity is absent from a gory monster piece. Hellboy's struggle with his demonic heritage is a supernatural identity crisis, not a portrait of neurodivergence. Arthurian legend and Nazi occultism are used as pulp mythology, not as revisionist history. The lecture energy is minimal. This is an R-rated romp with decapitations and Baba Yaga's chicken-leg house. It does not sermonize. It does not moralize. It simply splatters.

This leaves a film of modest cultural ambition and very messy execution. Its most notable progressive feature occurred off-screen, in a casting correction that the movie itself never acknowledges. That is not nothing. It is also not a thesis. We can applaud the gesture while noting that the text offers little else to classify. Hellboy is a reboot that bombed, a monster movie that mistakes volume for depth. For the purposes of this ledger, it sits near the bottom, a curiosity of production ethics wrapped around a very loud and very bloody shrug.