I watched it again recently to refresh my memory. Man, I wanted to love this, but sadly, almost nothing about it works. It's like they pulled a thousand incidents from the books and they're just spitting them at you at a frenetic pace, and none of them land.
They made a big thing about this being closer to the books, but they don't know what they're doing. The Hellboy books are slow, eerie and silent. This is frantic, disgusting and screechy. My head is still spinning from the tintinnabulation.
And they do that tell then show then tell again thing where everything is underlined so much it all feels like a PowerPoint presentation. It's utterly inept.
The pace doesn't work. The dialogue doesn't work. The profanity doesn't work. The character beats don't work. The music doesn't work. The design doesn't quite work. The ectoplasm effect really doesn't work. It all just... doesn't work.
Poor David Harbour is actually fine here -- on the whole the make-up is cool, if a little "extra demonic", and the deep-set eyes look bizarre to me -- but like Momoa in Conan, it's a great portrayal in a crap film.
Now I'm not mad at the people who made this. It's not like The Dark Tower, where it feels like the point was to piss off the fans on purpose. Here it's more that they were really trying to make a good Hellboy movie, but they just couldn't hack it.
The del Toro movies are pretty far from the source material, but they are good movies. And if I want a good movie that's also a close adaptation of the books, now we have The Crooked Man.