As hard as David Harbour tried to convince the world that the Hellboy reboot wasn’t a flaming dumpster fire, he eventually held his hands up and admitted it was just as terrible as everybody knew it was, to the extent he even revealed he retains a framed photo of himself as the character in his home to keep his ego in check.
On the other hand, director Neil Marshall didn’t even bother trying to defend the dismal do-over, letting rip on several occasions in the aftermath of the unnecessary reinvention of a franchise that should have ended with the third installment in Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman’s trilogy that we never got.
The Dog Soldiers and The Descent filmmaker offered the reasonable assessment that “It was just god awful, it’s not a film that I would consider to be part of my canon,” which was fairly tame compared to his scathing assessment that came later, in which he neatly summed up Hellboy to a tee.
“It was the worst professional experience of my life. The script was sh*t. The decision to make the film was a mistake. I signed up to it because they pitched this idea of ‘we want to do the horror version of Hellboy. We want to bring you and make a really darker, horror version.’ And then I quickly found out that A: the script was terrible. B: it was never going to get better before we shot it, despite many attempts. You can’t polish a turd, no matter how much you try. And I would have all creative control taken away from me to extreme levels. There’s nothing of me in that movie.”
That’s a sentiment anyone unfortunate enough to have seen Hellboy can agree with, but because Hollywood, reboot of a reboot The Crooked Man recently wrapped shooting, while streaming subscribers continue to waste their time on Marshall’s version. Per FlixPatrol, it’s appeared on the worldwide watch-list on both Prime Video and iTunes, for reasons that remain unfathomable.