Despite an evocative atmosphere and a rewarding embrace of folk horror, Brian Taylor’s take on the big, red paranormal detective feels creatively lost in limbo.
Hellboy is a promising property that’s periodically stumbled with its live-action adaptations. There’s such a rich world to pull from here that brilliantly mashes together Lovecraftian horror, pulp detective fiction, superhero storytelling, and sprawling adventures. At the same time, it takes a delicate hand to properly bring all these elements together into something that’s not only coherent, but entertaining. Hellboy’s cinematic offerings continue to mutate and hold a mirror up to changing pop culture trends. Hellboy versus witches in a haunted house, from the director of Crank and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, should be an easy home run. This is exactly why it’s so frustrating that Hellboy: The Crooked Man is such a generic and forgettable experience — as an action film, horror movie, and graphic novel adaptation.
There’s a fairly barebones plot that drives Hellboy: The Crooked Man forward, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it gives the movie more of an opportunity to flex its horror muscles and develop character. Set in 1959, Hellboy encounters an Appalachian community that’s afflicted by witches who answer to a darker demonic force, The Crooked Man. It’s admirable that The Crooked Man really wastes no time with exposition or table-setting. It throws the audience right into the middle of this adventure and it almost feels like the film’s first act has been chopped off in favor of getting tight to the good stuff. The Crooked Man is largely successful on this front and basically presumes that anyone who is watching has at least some level of familiarity with the Hellboy property. That being said, it’s still a slightly jarring tactic that may leave some audiences scrambling to catch up while Hellboy smashes monsters and his sidekick, Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense agent, Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph), espouses wisdom.
Hellboy himself dispenses sarcastic one-liners, which are true to the character, but also don’t do the film any favors. They make this feel like expendable superhero fare and soulless IP mining. Jack Kesy is absolutely fine in this role, but it’s nothing to get excited about and he’s not doing anything here that wasn’t previously touched upon by Ron Perlman or David Harbour. He doesn’t feel inauthentic to the curmudgeonly antihero, but the makeup and prosthetics are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Alternatively, Leah McNamara’s Effie Kolb, a haunted acolyte of The Crooked Man, delivers the film’s most memorable performance. McNamara channels an unpredictable and chaotic nature to Kolb as she gleefully skitters and taunts Hellboy and the other individuals who have been drawn into her wicked web. She’s at the center of many of the film’s strongest scenes and it’s unfortunate that the rest of the film can’t rise to her level.
Even the titular villain, The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), comes across as a rejected monster-of-the-week from a CW series.
One would think that The Crooked Man would benefit from the fact that its script is co-written by Hellboy creator, Mike Mignola, who certainly understands what’s necessary to tell a good Hellboy story. Co-writer Christopher Golden, while largely known for young adult fiction, also has penned several Hellboy books with Mignola and is no stranger to this character and his universe. This makes The Crooked Man’s shortcomings all the more perplexing and even reinforces that perhaps the best approach to a Hellboy movie is one that’s allowed to get quite liberal with its source material, take big swings, and focus on atmosphere, art direction, and creature designs, like with Guillermo del Toro’s two Hellboy films.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man’s first act is surprisingly effective and approaches the film like a folk horror monster mystery. It’s a rich, original angle for a Hellboy film that helps it establish an original voice and not feel derivative of past entries. Brian Taylor’s trademark hyperbolized filmmaking style is often on display as he utilizes visceral, handheld filmmaking through some of the action sequences that really works in the film’s favor and adds a kinetic dynamic to the experience. That being said, this striking quality progressively drains out of the movie the longer that it goes on and it begins to feel increasingly generic and bogged down in lengthy action set-pieces that often struggle to sustain themselves outside of a few compelling ideas that feel like vintage Taylor. There are brief glimpses of greatness when it comes to some crunchy body horror and disturbing visuals, but it’s never too long until they’re undercut by regrettable CGI. Hellboy largely uses practical effects for Hellboy and The Crooked Man, and it’s better off for it. Unfortunately, there are so many other monsters in the film that don’t benefit from the same treatment and look even worse when juxtaposed against the impressive work that’s done with its central characters.
The film’s reported $20 million budget is very much felt and there’s a lo-fi quality to the movie’s perpetual use of the woods as a primary setting. There are certain shots that even feel reminiscent of early Friday the 13th films, which is kind of incredible, before it begins to feel cheap. Neil Marshall’s 2019 Hellboy movie was by no means a success, but it definitely looked beautiful a lot of the time and did the most with its budget, which was more than double that of The Crooked Man. It’s hard to say if The Crooked Man would have been more successful with a bigger budget or if it would just succumb to the same problems on a grander scale. 2019’s Hellboy, while largely a forgotten film, at least features some genuinely grisly demon sequences and creative monster designs. The Crooked Man struggles on this front — outside of the titular Crooked Man’s design — and frequently feels like it’s taking shortcuts so it can rush to its ending and call it a day. There’s a good film buried deep in The Crooked Man, it just struggles to claw its way out of the ground as it’s progressively pulled down deeper.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man misses its mark and its periodic successes aren’t enough to justify this disappointing experience. Seasoned Hellboy fans will feel robbed of a substantial story and curious genre fans will be left wondering what they just watched. There’s not enough going on here beyond a few exciting scenes and committed performances to elevate this above any other modern folk horror film. Hellboy: The Crooked Man’s botched magic sadly means that the franchise’s curse only grows more potent. This will likely be the last time that anyone attempts a live-action Hellboy adaptation before it inevitably gets reduced to some eight-episode direct-to-streaming venture a few years down the line. It’s too bad that this BPRD bad-ass goes out with a whimper instead of a bold, double-barreled bang.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man is now available on at-home Digital.
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