Hellboy

An enervating and frenzied clutter of flashbacks, globe-trotting and gore, director Neil Marshall's reboot fails to match the otherworldly allure of Guillermo del Toro's original films. David Harbour (Stranger Things) struggles to fill Ron Perlman's hooves as Hellboy, who must fight the ancient Blood Queen (a struggling-to-be-evil Milla Jovovich), who has been revived by giants intent on causing worldwide pestilence. Any fantasy that combines King Arthur, Rasputin, Baba Yaga and Cilla Black in one convoluted universe deserves some faint praise. But while there's a great deal going on, nothing really adds up to very much, especially when the humour falls flat and it all comes smothered in grating in-jokes, banal profanity, scrappy visuals and overblown CGI. Marshall's hefty genre background means there's no stinting on gore, but the constantly shifting tone between serio-comic and bloated bombast means this satanic panic is just tragic.