Why Hellboy Failed
2. The Editing Is Shocking
The film’s edit is also a major reason why it's faceplanted so hard. Like Suicide Squad, from moment one the flick bombards you with exposition, characters and world building in such an uninspired way - obviously all to the tune of the very best indie rock tracks 2011 had to offer. The opening prologue in particular makes a bad first impression, delivered like one of those fake trailers for movies-within-movies. For a second, I genuinely thought that’s where they were going to go with it.
The film never stops to breathe, jumping around at a breakneck speed, introducing key players but never giving you a reason to care for them or understand who they are. It’s frustrating, because when the film does get a chance to slow down and actually let its characters interact, it shows real flair and highlights the potential of what could have been - particularly one strong sequence in an alternate dimension.
Unsurprisingly, this might also be the fault of the struggles between the directors and the producers. The Wrap reports that Neil Marshall, after finishing the movie to meet his vision the best he could, delivered a cut of the picture to the studio - which, the producers threw straight in the bin. In response, Singer again pointed out that Marshall wasn’t promised final cut on the movie - which admittedly a lot of directors do not get on major studio pictures.
However, The Wrap reports that even little things - like the design of a tree that recurs throughout the movie - became a source of contention between these two parties. Allegedly, Marshall wanted something a little more realistic, asymmetrical and normal, which Levin changed to something more surreal and symmetrical. But then, in post-production, Marshall changed it back once more.
The fact that the design of a tree became this war of attrition is indicative of just how broken the creative process was, and why a lot of the more promising features that made it into Hellboy feel compromised, unexplored, and haphazard.