Rotten Tomatoes: 11%Metacritic: 34/100Written Reviews:The A.V. Club - Katie RifeIn typical fairy-tale fashion, Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 film version of Mike Mignola’s comics series framed the demon-turned-demon hunter through the lens of a lovesick teenager. The new reboot of the franchise also approaches Hellboy from an adolescent point of view, but with a distinct variation on the concept: This is the sneering form of the word frequently lobbed at Transformers movies, the kind that prioritizes guitar riffs, sarcastic one-liners, and blustering tumbleweeds of CGI creatures wrestling each other.Birth.Movies.Death - Leigh MonsonIt’s an engaging conflict, but not enough time or energy is spent on making these characters likable or interesting to justify the attempted nuance. The editing is a haphazard mess, but the plot feels like such a hack job from what must have been an unreasonably longer cut that I can’t really fault the effort to bring this down to size. It certainly doesn’t help, though, that there are some very obvious post-production additions in the works here, from jokes added in ADR that land with a resounding thud to metal riff soundtrack choices that desperately want you to think this is the next Guardians of the Galaxy. I can assure you that it is not.The Chicago Tribune - Katie WalshWith this noisy, fast, chaotic "Hellboy," Marshall is at his most cheeky and most unhinged. It's certainly… a lot. Harbour is an ideal choice to sport the crown of sawed-off horns as the demon with a heart of gold, an investigator working for his father (Ian McShane) at the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. Harbour has a warmth and humor that shines through all the prosthetics, and an ease with sarcastic wisecracks too. The snarky asides, which permeate even the solemn voice-over that opens the film (which starts in yes, the 5th century, with yes, King Arthur), let us know everyone here is in on the joke. It's OK to laugh with the movie, even if it feels like we're laughing at it.Forbes - Scott MendelsonTo use the most cliché of all Shakespeare quotes, Hellboy is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is filled to the grim with ghoulish sights, horrific violence, punishing (if deeply unpoetic) action and unapologetic (if arbitrary) fantasy elements. That’s on its face, a good thing. I imagine some will (no judgment) enjoy Hellboy purely for what it contains. But the story is a mishmash of barely comprehensible jumble, held together only by an expository prologue and a character arc cribbed from the first Hellboy movie and thematics borrowed from The Golden Army.The Hollywood Reporter - John DeForeBut Neil Marshall's Hellboy isn't lousy because nobody wants it, nor only because it fails to live up to both its big-screen and its printed predecessors. It's just lousy. Bloated, vastly less funny than it aims to be and misguided in key design choices even when it scores with less important decisions, the film does make bold choices that might've paid off under other circumstances. But these aren't those circumstances.IGN - Meg DowneyAdd to the clutter of the plot some truly embarrassing CGI--and virtually all of it is CGI, there are maybe two practical effects in the movie outside of Harbour's costume and makeup--and you've got a real recipe for disaster. There's really no other way to say it: the movie looks cheap. Sometimes there's the sense that cheap is what it was going for--there's a certain sort of Army of Darkness-flavored B-movie sensibility to a handful of scenes--but the gags and the jokes never land well enough to actually sell the self-awareness. Other scenes and characters just look downright dated, to the point where the terribly green-screened edges and horribly rendered monsters actually seem distracting.Indiewire - Eric KohnA bloodier, sillier remix of the earlier entries in this unlikely franchise, “Hellboy” swaps Perlman for “Stranger Things” detective David Harbour, whose large frame and snarky posturing on that show was basically a Ron Perlman homage, anyway. Harbour makes for a formidable Hellboy in a visually snappy milieu that, like del Toro’s earlier entries, takes its cues from Mignola’s sardonic horror-fantasy universe. There’s plenty to enjoy about the latest absurdist odyssey, which finds Hellboy grappling with his sinister origin amidst some Arthurian gobbledygook about the coming apocalypse. However,Marshall works so hard to make the zany underworld-gone-wild formula entertaining when the entertainment value is already baked into the material. All that eager wackiness has a breaking point.The Los Angeles Times - Justin ChangPerhaps the best defense that can be mustered in support of Marshall’s “Hellboy” is that the director’s affection for the material is no less real or exuberant than Del Toro’s; it’s just a lot more crudely, monotonously expressed. The movie seems to spring from a curious awareness of how unnecessary it is, and it responds in the manner of an uninvited guest, with no interest in behaving or ingratiating itself. We are hurled, with a rude but fitting lack of ceremony, into a smorgasbord of R-rated horror and fantasy conventions, replete with weird detours into Arthurian legend, Mayan mythology and Slavic folklore, and rendered in the director’s preferred visual idiom of disemboweled corpses and beautifully art-directed entrails.Slashfilm - Josh SpiegelIn a word, Hellboy is unpleasant. Other appropriate adjectives to describe this reboot include dreadful, obnoxious, unnecessary, and interminable. Considering the shadow cast by the two Hellboy films written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, it might be easy to presume that this new version simply pales in comparison. Though that’s true, let’s not belabor the point: this Hellboy is quite bad all on its own. There’s no need to compare this to del Toro’s films, because to do so would just inspire pain.Uproxx - Vince ManciniDid it need to exist? Probably not. Am I glad it does? Absolutely. Will it be a movie people yell at me in six months for loving? …Possibly. Exuberantly gross and proudly ridiculous, this Hellboy feels like the picture Glenn Danzig sees in his head when he doodles in his notebook.Variety - Owen GliebermanThat’s true of the movie as well. It’s lunging to be a badass hard-R epic, but it’s basically a pile of origin-story gobbledygook, frenetic and undercooked, full of limb-hacking, eye-gouging monster battles as well as an atmosphere of apocalyptic grunge that signifies next to nothing. Playing Hellboy, David Harbour has a tough act to follow and does well, but the real tough act to follow is del Toro’s.The Washington Post - Alan ZilbermanSometimes “more adult” does not mean “more mature.” That’s the central problem facing “Hellboy,” the reboot of the comic book character popularized in films by Guillermo del Toro. The original 2004 movie and its 2008 sequel were PG-13 affairs, with a focus on the demonic antihero’s lovable streak. Under the direction of Neil Marshall, a filmmaker with his own horror/fantasy bona fides, this Hellboy curses, eviscerates, flays and disembowels. Marshall and screenwriter Andrew Cosby went overboard with their R-rating, introducing so much gore and profanity that it, quite frankly, gets dull. The flat performances and incoherent story do not help matters.The Wrap - William BibbianiMarshall’s “Hellboy” is a horrifyingly good time. It captures the breathless quality of reading 30 issues of a single comic-book series in one sugar-addled afternoon, shoving as many amazing characters and storylines and images into one film as it can possibly hold. It could have seemed overstuffed and frenetic, but this new “Hellboy” instead comes across as imaginative and freewheeling. Even the shocking violence is fun and humorous, harkening back to the good old days of splatstick horror classics like the “Evil Dead” and “Waxwork” movies. via /r/movies http://bit.ly/2KqtEPu
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