Alex_Barfield’s review published on Letterboxd:
Lionsgate... Honestly, what were you thinking with this one. Couldn't you just let Guillermo Del Toro just make Hellboy 3 that we never got? But instead, you gave us quite possibly the worst superhero reboot since the likes of Fant4stic. I'd rather watch Venom than this.
First off, all of the performances are all so barren and wooden. David Harbour tries what he can do as Hellboy, but fails miserably due to poor writing on the character's part and doesn't even hold a candle to the iconic performance that Ron Perlman brought to the character in the Del Toro movies. Milla Jovovich as the blood queen gives quite possibly her worst performance in her entire career. And even the other side characters in this movie are so unbelievably forgettable and you don't find yourself caring for any of them.
The action sequences aren't anywhere near as exciting as the first 2 Hellboy movies. First reason is because of the editing as the editing is so poorly done and choppily editing that you have a hard time as seeing or understanding what is going on when an action scene is going on. And the second reason is that the Visual Effects are very poor in this movie, for instance there is a scene where a character transforms into an animal and the visual effects and the CGI for the transformation sequence look atrocious. And some designs for some of the demonic creatures while they do have some interesting looks and designs for them, the CGI work is so bad you think it would look like something that was meant to go onto the SYFY channel.
The script writing is so unbalanced. The movie relies so much on over-exposition and flashbacks and even scenes that are in the film that don't add up to anything in the long run and you just come up asking yourself, "What was that even about or even important?" Even the tone of the film is all over the place as it keeps going from light-hearted to gruesome and dark constantly and it comes off as so inconsistent and you wonder if you are actually watching the exact same movie or if somehow two different versions of this movie were made and the two movies were somehow edited and stitched together to make a Frankenstein's monster equivalent to what this movie came out to be. This movie is on the same level as Justice League from 2017 with inconsistent storytelling and tone imbalance. The movie also ends on a terrible way to try to get a sequel made which is never going to happen...hopefully.
All in all, Hellboy 2019 is an absolute disgrace to the Superhero genre. And I wanted to like this movie, as I am a big fan of the director of the film Neil Marshall who made one of the greatest horror movies that I have seen called The Descent.
But, with bland and dull acting across the board, action sequences that are so poorly constructed and shot, visual effects that look like dated CGI from the 1990's, writing that is so poor, and over-reliant on exposition that make the viewers feel like idiots and an imbalance of a tone consistency. Hellboy 2019 is a movie that ironically enough deserves to burn in the 9 circles of Hell.