**This is an older review I wrote on Letterboxd a while back, but I wanted to put it up here so I had it on my own site as well. Enjoy!**

After the bad reviews, I went into this expecting a trainwreck. When it started, I found myself kinda pleasantly surprised. I wondered just what everyone online was complaining about — this movie was funny, and seemed to be self aware of how ridiculous it was, a la STARSHIP TROOPERS. After about an hour, though, I started to understand.

There are great moments in this movie, and then there are moments where the plot has to happen. And that’s a shame because many of the best scenes are virtually pointless but feature fun character focused stuff. When I read that Dave Harbour was playing a “younger Hellboy,” I was confused, but seeing it in action, that’s exactly what he’s doing. Harbour’s Hellboy is to Perlman’s what Alden Ehrenreich’s Solo was to Harrison Ford’s — lighter, more innocent, more earnest. And I genuinely loved that. However, he deserved a way better movie (and a slightly better makeup job to help him emote just a bit more. I’m glad he opted for practical vs CGI, I just wish they’d gone with either a little less, or used more flexible material).

This has at least 3 movies worth of plot in 2 hours, so the movie starts with narration and never seems to stop. The opening flashback/prologue/narration is so rushed, it felt like Edgar Wright’s visualizations of Shaun’s plans in Shaun of the Dead, or Luis’s recaps in ANT-MAN. There are, no joke, FIVE flashback sequences, and all but one are only tangentially related to the plot.

The good? The humor worked for me mostly, the music choices are great and fit the aesthetic well, Harbour is a lot of fun, the practical creature effects are frequently fantastic, and while the CGI was occasionally pretty trash, some of the body horror sequences and Lovecraftian creature designs were gross and amazing and I loved them. I think the people complaining about the gore either ignored the R rating or aren’t fans of horror, and this is definitely a horror action fantasy.

The trouble is getting to those small moments of good is often frustrating, exhausting, and dull. For a movie no one was clamoring for, this felt oddly rushed out, and that’s a shame. There’s good stuff in there, but not enough to be worth the plot hangover.