Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024) Faithful adaptation preaches to the converted, forgets to shepherd a new flock (Review)

The clue should be in the name: there are fewer franchises more cursed than Hellboy. The first two outings for Mike Mignola’s gentle red giant fared well enough, with Guillermo del Toro’s luscious vision and Ron Perlman’s career-defining take on the character proving to be a leftfield refreshment in the early days of the superhero genre. The brakes were pumped on a third installment following del Toro’s commitment to other projects and Father Time ticking away at Perlman’s age, so a rebooted and re-studio-ed version starring David Harbour was commissioned with a risque R-rating in the wake of Deadpool’s sleeper success. A mean-spirited and compromised work, it was universally reviled, leading to another creative stocktake that reevaluated Hellboy’s place as a relevant anti-hero. A peripheral character in this saga was Mignola himself, disgruntled after creative differences and wasted time on both stabs at his most iconic character, so after twenty years of Hellboy’s tumultuous on-screen history, it’s only appropriate he takes a step forward and a stab at it himself. With The Crooked Man, an adaptation of a standalone comic book early on in Hellboy’s canon, Mignola co-writes and gives his stamp of approval to Crank co-director Brian Taylor’s version, the lowest-budget and consciously contrarian live-action rendering yet. With history proving unkind to Big Red, does his latest outing satisfy audiences as well as its creator?

We catch up with the gruff and likable domestic demon (played here by Deadpool 2 star Jack Kesy) in 1958, on a train ride through Appalachia with two BPRD agents and a possessed spider in tow. A brawl with the annoyed arachnid sends Hellboy and bookish researcher Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) tumbling down into the bleak forests below the tracks and into a whole new mystery involving a community of witches led by a malevolent entity known menacingly as ‘The Crooked Man’ (Martin Bassindale). A series of spooky happenings send Hellboy and Song down a dark path of self-discovery that owes far more to the folk horror trappings of something along the lines of The VVitch than any version of Mignola’s hero so far.

It’s a refreshing change of pace on paper. Keeping an adult rating but turning down the light on its tone is a good idea, aligning more with the appeal of the Dark Horse comics that hold a sacred status for many. An economy-wise budget is also a solid move; 2019’s Hellboy bombed embarrassingly against a modest $50 million production, so further scaling back on the expenditure has given a much wider margin for a successful reboot. Yet the obscurity of the vision here is its biggest gamble, with one of Mignola’s oddest, thinnest and most atmospheric stories being a difficult one to capture with financial obstacles in the way. Taylor is a director with a wacked-out style that he brings to horror fairly well; all grim greys and wide angles feel right at home in the twilight world of The Crooked Man, and his splatter credentials have been proven time and time again.

So why doesn’t it land? Chalk it up to some needlessly off-putting decisions in the opening that hobble it straight out of the gate, including an attitude that this version of Hellboy is already characterful and well-established enough to not warrant a proper introduction. Sure, maybe Batman or Spider-Man can get away with it, with IP so well-established again and again that another detail-heavy origin story is totally unnecessary. The difference here is that Kesy’s Hellboy feels undercooked, recognisably as grizzled as a good Hellboy should be, but lacking in the distinctive personality Perlman and Harbour brought to theirs, for better or worse. Perlman brought a warm geniality to the burly brute, and Harbour’s misguided but effortful chippiness encapsulated the barbed obnoxiousness of the film around him. Kesy is softly-spoken and sardonic, grumbling dry-humoured one-liners in some decent chemistry with Rudolph, and feels like more of a detective here than he has in any other on-screen iteration. There’s just something missing, some disservice made by the material that gives Kesy little to work with. The Crooked Man is admittedly not a tale where Hellboy is the driving force; in the comic run, he’s essentially a passenger in the spiritual journey of Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), a drifter returning home to find his soul hounded by The Crooked Man and screeching harpie Effie Kolb (Leah McNamara). In that respect, perhaps it’s not the best way to set up a new Hellboy actor, but a new overall direction for the property that is doggedly faithful to the film adaptation’s detriment.

There are many scenes taken from Mignola’s text verbatim, and Taylor occasionally brings them to life in an appropriately eerie way. The highlight is a hugely unsettling transformation scene where the skinsuit of a woman is inhabited in gruesome fashion by a raccoon, and the comic’s amusing interlude where an ancient crone interrupts the action to give the reader a witchball recipe feels of a piece here. However, a baffling edit keeps the film stumbling between scenes, fading to black at frequent intervals when Taylor decides he’s unceremoniously done with a certain stretch. It’s this kind of temporal blackout that leaves the building atmosphere at a crucial flatline, despite accurately recreating sights from the comic and beefing out other elements to coherent effect. Hellboy’s apocalyptic destiny is teased enticingly here and weaved into the Crooked Man’s despicable nicely, and the addition of completely new character Bobbie Jo Song works so well you wouldn’t know she was never a part of any Hellboy comic before this adaptation. It just never digs its claws into the material deep enough to count any more than a just-fine horror riff that just happens to star one of comic book history’s best anti-heroes.

There’s a nobility in the failures of The Crooked Man that elevate it above the ugliness of Hellboy’s previous on-screen outing. It’s also nice that Mignola has a degree of peace in having a proper creative stake that was acknowledged and respected when he spent two decades feeling otherwise. It’s just not the film that this franchise needed, hampered by a derivativeness that extends away from the hyper-stylised pages of Mignola’s creation and into the familiar territory of DTV horror. It plays like a mid-season, two-part episode of a Hellboy TV show on a cable network, which is admittedly not a repulsive concept, but not an ideal one for a theatrical experience. Where Hellboy’s journey goes from here is hard to say; one can only hope his next appearance has more flavour.

Simon’s Archive – Hellboy: the Crooked Man