Review: Hellboy (2019)

Hellboy
Cert: 15 / 121 mins / Dir. Neil Marshall / Trailer



Hang on, I thought we'd all agreed to stop putting King Arthur in movies for the next hundred years or so? It doesn't work. We know it doesn't work*¹. And it especially doesn't work when you open your movie with Ian McShane grasping the mantle handed to him by the departure of dear John Hurt, the faux-gravitas of his acerbic voiceover setting the scriptual bar at a clunkingly low level before stepping into the shoes of Professor Broom, erstwhile father-figure to David Harbour's Hellboy.

Born in the latter days of the Second World War from a crazed Nazi experiment to attain victory by channelling the forces of the netherworld, an infant demon has been raised to adulthood by Broom and the Bureau For Paranormal Research And Defense, now an agent for the organisation where he assists in keeping the world safe from unspeakable terrors. So far, so much like the previous two movies. But this relative harmony is shattered by the return of the Blood Queen, Nimue (Mila Jovovich), dismembered and scattered by King Arthur centuries earlier, but being gradually re-assembled for reanimation by her loyal henchman, Gruagach (Stephen Graham). Because, as with so many resurgent tyrants, she's coming back to ensure humanity's destruction...

IMAGINE

And it's even sillier than you'd imagine, somehow. As noted above, the film does not get off to a good start. Andrew Cosby's screenplay is clunky, preposterous and without a cast who can really carry off most of it. That said, within ten minutes Hellboy is all-in battling an errant demon at a Mexican wrestling match while Scorpions' Rock You Like A Hurricane plays over the top. If that's not a signpost for the weapons-grade silliness to follow, nothing is. Of course, it's at this point that the casual viewer may well think 'hang on, this has gone full 'Dusk Till Dawn' incredibly early - where is there to go from here?' The answer comes in the metaphorical form of director Neil Marshall pointing at a dial and saying "...but this film goes up to 11".

Despite this full-on action being activated from the off, the film's first act suggests that there's not really enough 'new' content here to justify a full cinematic reboot for the franchise (although it was initially slated to be an in-universe prequel). Without Guillermo Del Toro's melancholy touch*², Hellboy becomes Kingsman-meets-Nightbreed. And it turns out the differently-labelled bottle that no one asked for is the tonic we all needed.

SWEET LORD

It's difficult to un-learn Ron Perlman's anti-hero but Harbour makes this interpretation his own in short order, giving a surprisingly rounded turn (for this film) as a character with a demon's body, a hero's responsibilities and very human limitations. McShane barks his way through the script as only he can, yet he's still like Laurence Olivier compared to Milla Jovovich, gnawing her way through the scenery in full pantomime-mode. The plot structure is by now par for the course with this sort of thing, and scripting issues continue way past the opening scene-setting. It's unclear how much of this is inherent to a property which carries its corniness with more sincerity on the printed page.

But when the talking's over and it's time for action, Hellboy is good fun. Bloody good fun (and often very bloody). Perhaps more fun than someone like Guillermo knows how to have, in all honesty. It's a movie made by someone who seems to genuinely not care what the critics think; which is either the ultimate in artistic purity, or a staggering lack of self-awareness. Possibly both.

STAND TOGETHER

Basically a live-action horror cartoon, Hellboy is unapologetically schlocky. Whether this is a good or a bad thing will depend almost entirely on the viewer. Despite the many words which will be written about Marshall's project (including these), it's a film which boldly defies critical appraisal. Acutely aware of how daft it is and just not caring anyway. And is all the better for that. Marshall and Cosby initially do a solid enough job of starting things in medias res, with backstory left for the viewer to pluck from between the heavy-handed lines of conversation.

As things move on however, it becomes clear they're both buggers for an expository flashback, taking 'show-don't-tell' to startling new levels of superfluousness. They also absolutely adore a casual fuck-bomb. Hellboy more than earns its hard 15 certificate on the language alone, the vast majority of which is delivered with a very British facetiousness that may well pass over the heads international audiences*³.

Your humble correspondent went into this with no real baggage, struggled with its unwieldy nature, yet found himself grinning like an idiot by the third act. Mötley Crüe playing over a laboratory shoot-out? Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Embrace the ridiculousness and it's one hell of a ride. There are industrial amounts of sequel-baiting going on, including mid- and end-credit stingers, but that's okay - a movie's got to at least try and leave its options open.

2019's Hellboy is demonstrably not a great film. And it's still the most gleefully excessive fun I've had in the cinema this year…

Oh, Drive Angry. Fuck yeah.



Well, me and about five other people on the planet think so.



With the best will in the world, see this BIG or don't bother.
As much as I love it, I'm not sure how it'll translate to the small screen.



I can't call that one. I absolutely loved Marshall's Dog Soldiers back in the day, but have to admit that it's not aged well.



Well it's looking that way, isn't it?



Not that I heard, but there's a shit-ton of screaming going on here, so I may well have missed it. Yet at the same time, a movie like Hellboy would wear a Wilhelm on its sleeve proudly, so let's go with 'no'.



Level 1: Well, there's a definite Taun-taun reference when they're at the chip shop, but also General Draven is in this.





*¹ Yeah, I just didn't go to see The Kid Who Would Be King, recently. Heard nothing but good things about it, yet every time I sat through the trailer in a cinema I could feel my ulcer loosening its belt another notch. That film looks custom-designed to annoy me and I see no reason to confirm that it fulfils its remit. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² While I don't actively dislike his work, Guillermo Del Toro is basically Tim Burton for film-snobs. There. I said it. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ One of the film's low-key standouts is where Gruagach - the seven foot tall boar-headed demon with a thick Scouse accent who uses the fuck-word as punctuation - offers Nimue the Blood Queen some actual Jaffa Cakes. Fantastic stuff. This is hands-down the best product placement since Seabrook Crisps rocked up in The Fast & The Furious. ^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Daddy's Home

Daddy's Home
Cert: 12A / 96 mins / Dir. Sean Anders / Trailer



Wow, this might be the Will Ferrell's laziest movie since Get Hard. No wait, this is Will Ferrell's first movie since Get Hard. Although it's also both. He's joined in this thankless endeavour*¹ by comedic deadweight Mark Wahlberg, who starred in a Transformers movie that was less mechanical than this. Every step in the three-hand screenplay is heavily telegraphed, patronisingly executed and then called-back half an hour later, where it's congratulated by itself as it pats the audience on the back for remembering the thing they were just shown.

But let's be entirely fair, Daddy's Home doesn't fail as a formulaic, broad-strokes comedy. The film is every bit as slapdash and uninventive as it means to be, and as much as I'm bitching and moaning about it, I wasn't in the least bit surprised by anything that happened. It's not necessarily badly done, it's just blandly done, refusing to drive outside its own metaphorical coned-off safe area*² and recycling the tropes from a hundred other slapstick, one-upmanship comedies while bringing nothing new to the shrieking party. Although even with a 12A certificate nerfing-out the worst excesses of the genre, the movie is still too tonally coarse to be the kids' comedy flick it clearly should be, and can't quite commit to either side of the dick-joke fence.

Considering Daddy's Home is just the single premise from the trailer stretched out for an hour and a half, it doesn't half drag its feet in telling that joke, and the more that the antics escalate (you've seen the punchlines in the trailer, remember), the more pedestrian it somehow becomes. Wahlberg at least appears to be enjoying himself a little as the resentful blowhard dad, but Ferrell's earnest counter-performance slips into autopilot with the first line of his sporadic (and needless) narration. Linda Cardellini and Bobby Canavale seem to spend their scenes silently consoling themselves that at least they're part of the Marvel universe now, and poor Hannibal Buress looks embarrassingly lost throughout.

If anything, the film is absolved slightly in that I've seen both leads in worse movies than this one, and I'm genuinely not sure if either can better themselves any more. Steve Carrell is off making waves in the grown-up's pool, Ferrell is still splashing around in his armbands…

Warning: The film also features the worst CGI-enhanced motorcycle gag you've witnessed this year, irrespective of many many or few CGI-enhanced motorcycle gags you've seen this year.

Oh, and I confess that I did laugh out loud in the film's finale when a young boy punches a young girl in the face, although I think that was just a release mechanism since I'd been sat there willing someone to be convincingly hurt for about an hour and a half…



If you're one of the poorly-behaved customers which surrounded me tonight on their annual post-Christmas cinema visit, chattering and yapping throughout the movie and generally acting like Screen 4 was their own living room, then apparently so.



Telly, if you must.



Hahahahaha.



Oh, probably.



If you're going to look me in the eye and tell me you enjoyed Daddy's Home, I expect you to have some weapons-grade reasoning to hand…



There isn't, although it is used for the skateboard/powerline gag in the trailer.



Daddy's Home stars Linda Cardellini, who was in the Scooby Doo movies with Freddie 'Kanan' Prinze Jr and Sarah Michelle 'Seventh Sister' Gellar.







*¹ By which I mean that I'm going to thank no-one for this film.

*² Although there was one moment in the third-act where the script suddenly tries its hand at being self-referentially meta, at which I thought "Oh, don't you fucking dare. You haven't earned the right to make fun of what a mainstream comedy-flick would do in this situation, since you're barely at that level yourself…". Although unlike (seemingly) the rest of tonight's audience, I didn't say this out loud. Plus, I didn't have to; I knew I'd be typing this...

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Sideways

Sideways (2004)
Cert: 15 / 122 mins / Dir. Alexander Payne / Trailer



And here we are with another film which has been recommended many times to me over the years, but usually by people whose cinematic opinions I don't entirely trust, somehow. A comedy about mid-life crises and wine-tasting always seemed a little... well, middle-class frankly, and I have a hard enough time reining in my snobbery as it is.

I'll say right away that I enjoyed Sideways, even though I rarely felt entirely comfortable with it*¹. The melancholic-comedy about a stag-week for two 40-something fuck-ups often feels like Clerks for the middle-aged, and the romance and bromance threads don't always gel as neatly as they're intended to, almost like the scripts for two entirely different films have been spliced together.

What really sets the film on edge is that the comedic moments themselves elicit more winces-of-recognition than outright laughs; by no means a bad thing, but it's not the escapism I usually look for in a stag-party movie. That said, director Alexander Payne certainly knows how to get the best from his cast, and the dependably marvellous Paul Giamatti is supported with great turns from Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh and Thomas Haden Church (who appears to be playing the 17yr-old-in-a-45yr-old's-body from a bodyswap comedy, but plays it so well that it doesn't matter).

As admirable as Sideways is, I can't hand-on-heart rate it as the classic that everyone else seems to, but it's certainly worth watching in a Sunday-afternoon/bottle-of-wine sort of a way.

Although the film will also make you feel inferior about the wine you've chosen to drink…

Nope.



Yep.



To some, but not to all.



There isn't.



Paul Giamatti appears as Rhino in Amazing Spider-Man 2; a film which also stars Felicity Jones, who'll be appearing in the upcoming Star Wars standalone, Rogue One.







*¹ And probably because I didn't feel entirely comfortable with it. The film proudly bears its indie-roots, despite looking and feeling like a studio-flick.

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.