Like Clockwork

Rating: 3/10 (8 October 2019)

Stop me if this sounds familiar: a wise-cracking hero combats baddies who are occult Nazis, which leads the hero and his pals into a booby-trapped tomb. Or how about a baddie who seemingly twirls daggers merely for the generic swoosh-and-whoosh sound effects--even Indian Jones couldn't be bothered to put up with that nonsense. (By the way, does anyone else feel that the unlocking of Hellboy's chamber looks and sounds a bit too much like that motif in the X-Men movies for unlocking Cerebro?) Then, there's the typical superhero-action-movie squishy monsters that incinerate instead of bleed, and, to further ensure that PG-13 rating, clothes hardly burn up in fire, either. If all of this weren't predictable enough, there's also the repetitiveness of the fight scenes, whereupon Hellboy fights the same sort of squishy monster three times, each with their own mini-cliffhangers, lots of punching sounds and such, and a combination of wire-work practical effects and loads of villainous CGI. Plus, he also fights another--even bigger--squishy monster in yet another scene. Hellboy even eavesdrops on his paramour with another guy twice. Soap-opera love triangle screenwriting for a superhero movie, c'mon.
Along with the nominal romance, most of the characters here are bland. The baddies sure are, and even the merman is more interesting as comparison to the similar Creature from the Black Lagoon that Guillermo del Toro developed more fully later on in his Best-Picture-Oscar-winning "The Shape of Water" (2017) than he is as an actual character in "Hellboy." Perhaps, the most apt character in this one is that dagger-twirling Nazi, because he runs on clockwork--much like the movie does. Mechanical, predictable and repetitive. "Hellboy" doesn't even manage to do anything interesting with its meta comic-book within the comic-book movie. Years later, "Logan" (2017) would. Neither does del Toro do anything compelling with all of his stylish characters and cinematic imitations. At least, in "The Shape of Water," he played some with expectations by reversing the colonialist message of "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954). "Hellboy," on the other hand, is probably what you'd expect it to be because you've likely seen many other movies that are just the same. It's like clockwork.