Savior Gaming

 There are a few rare times in life where I’d say a sequel is just as good as the original. Many try being bigger and better and failing. Hellboy was a cool superhero movie and 4 years later came the sequel, indeed bigger and more badass but does Hellboy 2 still keep the magic of the first?

Life is changing for our lovable, stone armed demonic hero. Abe stumbles on the secret Liz is keeping that she’s pregnant with Hellboy’s son; Hellboy has a new boss after years of breaking cover and damages in the strict and peculiar Dr Kraus and Hellboy has to deal with being exposed to the public. Meanwhile Abe discovers love with a Elven princess on the run from her twin brother, who plans on unleashing a unstoppable army on mankind. Can Hellboy and his friends stop this dormant evil?

Whether the second Hellboy movie is better than the first is up for debate; they’re pretty damn close in my opinion but I like the second one just a little more. The action is indeed bigger and better with a more compelling villain. The characters we knew from the first grow and we do feel for them. Del Toro’s strange art style comes out in full and it makes it feel more wondrous than the first. The only little gripe I have is that it does feel a little more mainstream than the first movie. I don’t think the tones and plot structure hurt the movie at all. I think it’s one of the better sequels I’ve ever seen and I do recommend it. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

As we often do here on the blog, when something ” new” comes out ( I say “new” in quotations because how much do we get in art anymore is actually new really) we tend to look back at what came before. what launched me to look in this uncanny place was the Hellboy 2019 first trailer . Also, I don’t normally begin reviews this way but I am today- Ron Pearlman will always be Hellboy to me in the category of RDJ as Iron Man, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, or Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. He is simply awesome.

Hellboy is a strange kind of hero. His father, Professor Trevor Broom finds him during a paranormal operation during WW2; a little red boy with horns, tail and a stone arm breaches his way into our world from another. Decades later, the child has grown into pretty much a normal dude that just happens to be the destined bringer of doom, look like the devil, and work for the government fighting all sorts of cool supernatural shit along with his friend and psychic fish man Abe Sapien, and dealing with his rocky relationship with volatile pyro-kinectic sweetheart Liz and together they face Rasputin, who brought Hellboy here and is out to start the end of days…

Hellboy is a pretty damn unique superhero movie in a lot of ways. The characters are strange and humanly flawed, there’s a meta edge to the film and the comics it’s based and there’s a good balance between light and dark elements. As I said, Pearlman is fantastic as Hellboy and the supporting characters are pretty solid. I must say the villains are bland by comparison and a rare occasion where the heroes way outshine the bad guys. This was the movie that made me a fan of Guillermo Del Toro, who was a perfect fit for the strange world and he clearly appreciated the source material. In the end, Hellboy was a cool superhero movie that I feel deserves more credit than it got and definitely deserves a watch. May the gods bring you glory.