Metacritic reviews

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the 2019 version of Hellboy is busy to an exhausting degree, overloaded with apocalyptic fears, and seemingly endless in its pileup of twists. But it’s hard to read much into a movie less invested in shrewd observations than in stuffing as much lore as possible into 120 minutes.

With this noisy, fast, chaotic "Hellboy," Marshall is at his most cheeky and most unhinged. It's certainly… a lot.

Less a thrilling adventure tale than a trip to a teenager’s messy, sock-strewn bedroom.

While the movie is a mess, it can be a fun ride as long as you first put your brain into "do not disturb" mode.

Hellboy is a thin, clumsy, and charmless attempt at rebooting a beloved franchise. It's populated by forgettable characters motivated by confusing stakes, cheaply executed visuals, and distracting editing. Somewhere, a finger on a Hellboy fan's monkey's paw is curling up -- sure, HB might finally be back in the spotlight, but he definitely would have been better off left alone.

It’s lunging to be a badass hard-R epic, but it’s basically a pile of origin-story gobbledygook, frenetic and undercooked, full of limb-hacking, eye-gouging monster battles as well as an atmosphere of apocalyptic grunge that signifies next to nothing.

Marshall and screenwriter Andrew Cosby went overboard with their R-rating, introducing so much gore and profanity that it, quite frankly, gets dull. The flat performances and incoherent story do not help matters.

It's just lousy. Bloated, vastly less funny than it aims to be and misguided in key design choices even when it scores with less important decisions, the film does make bold choices that might've paid off under other circumstances. But these aren't those circumstances.

It’s really a series of violent vignettes strung together, getting more and more outlandish and introducing characters at such a blistering pace that you just want it to stop already.

Between the overblown poor CG, witless dialogue and pervasive, numbing violence, the new Hellboy deserves its own special circle in Dante’s inferno.