The Fatal Mistake Every Hellboy Movie Made (That Netflix Can Fix)

Seriously. This is his destiny, yes, but confronting your destiny kind of loses its impact if you end up doing it in every story. Hellboy is consistently characterised as a guy running from having to deal with his fated role in ushering in the apocalypse, focusing on monster-fighting in the here and now to avoid having to think about the bigger picture. But that setup doesn't really work if every screen story is literally the big picture. They need to establish a baseline "normal" for these characters for there to be any narrative weight to Hellboy being forced out of that normal and into the destiny-confronting stuff. That's where the small picture of an on-running TV story could step in.

Hellboy 2019 is undoubtedly a bad movie on many levels - its dialogue is cackhandedly unquotable, its visuals small and boxed in, and its CGI effects poorly rendered and not appearing to exist in the same physical space as the actors - but its decision to adapt the comics' Blood Queen story arc is understandable. That storyline is really the climactic event of Hellboy's whole comic book run, the high stakes epic clash with an unstoppable adversary in which our hero must finally make the choices he has been constantly deferring.

The thing with the Blood Queen story being a climax, though, is that climaxes rely on the build up to give them a foundation for the audience's investment. Hellboy battling Nimue the Blood Queen on the page was the result of 16 years of comic book storytelling, weaving in what may have seemed trivial incidents from one-shot stories years earlier to give dramatic heft to the story. In barely two hours, the 2019 movie tries to give villainous characters like the Gruagach and Baba Yaga grudges against Hellboy. But they are grudges that are given no time to fester like they are in years across the background of other comic book stories.

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