Why Hellboy Failed
3. The Humour Never Lands
Away from the rewrites, there's also another problem with the script: it’s painfully unfunny. There are some jokes that land, and an always great delivery from David Harbour sometimes manages to make you laugh even when the material doesn’t deserve a chuckle, but there’s so many one-liners packed into this thing that undercut any tension.
Hellboy’s wacky sidekicks are particularly bad for this, always cracking these terrible, terrible jokes in baffling British accents.
And then there’s the meta humour, which is half-heartedly thrown in seemingly just because Deadpool did it and Deadpool’s popular, right? It’s the kind of film that thinks just swearing is funny - and it will make you appreciate all the films it was inspired by, like Deadpool, which managed to do this brand of comedy so much better.