Indie studio Ketchup Entertainment has a new Hellboy movie out, but you won’t find Hellboy: The Crooked Man in theaters this week. It’s a small movie: no big stars, a limited theatrical release only in the U.K. and Belgium. It’s been shunted onto digital listings with zero fanfare. So the exercise of reviewing it feels a bit like kicking a crooked man while he’s down. The movie has already been buried: Is there value in exhuming its corpse to enumerate the ways it isn’t worth your $19.99 worth of VOD money?
You can already see there are more paragraphs here, so… Yes. Hellboy: The Crooked Man has lots of piecemeal problems, but there’s a bigger conceptual mistake here that should serve as a warning to anyone trying to reboot Mike Mignola’s comic as a film franchise for a fourth time. Filmmakers need to stop trying to directly adapt Hellboy stories into feature-length movies constructed around visual realism. It does the character — indeed, the entire concept — a disservice.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man is based on the Hellboy comic of the same name, but the film’s first divergence from that story comes in its opening sequence, in which son of Satan turned paranormal investigator Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and agent Bobbie Jo Song (an original character created for the movie, played by Adeline Rudolph), survive a train crash and become stranded in the Appalachian wilderness. From there, they stumble onto the original plot of the Crooked Man comic, a three-issue story written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and drawn by Richard Corben. Hellboy and Jo join a local man, Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), who wishes to free a woman suspected of being a witch from her doom, even as he’s haunted by the “Crooked Man,” an agent of the devil.
The remarkable thing about this train-accident frame is that it sounds like a great way to give newbies a quick little recap of who Hellboy is, why he looks like that, and how he came to be a paranormal investigator, all before getting to the main plot. But while the script takes care to let us know that Jo is a desk agent and has no experience with field work, there is no actual mention of the agency (presumably the comics’ Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense?) that she and Hellboy work for, just a single reference to their boss being named “Broom,” which remains unelaborated on. Crooked Man has zero on-ramp for people unfamiliar with Hellboy, a wild thing for a supposed “reboot” to leave out.
That gives the whole opening a fan-film kind of vibe, which is enhanced by some real B-movie CGI of Hellboy battling a monster foe, shot in poorly timed cuts that try, but don’t quite succeed, to obscure how rarely he and his opponent occupy the frame at the same time. Kesy’s latex makeup and red right hand are valiant efforts, but they’re still more cosplay than movie costume.
The acting in Crooked Man ranges from unmemorable to bad, with a selection of particularly overdone “yokel accents.” At times, director Brian Taylor (of the Nicolas Cage movie Mom and Dad, and the Neveldine and Taylor team who made the Crank movies, Gamer, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance) takes care to underscore the 1950s setting, as when an elderly local woman remarks that Jo looks like a “li’l Oriental doll.” At other times, things just do not click temporally. (“Helter Skelter” scrawled across a haunted house’s walls?)
The pacing is terrible and the exposition is forced. (It is simply the height of screenwriter laziness to have Hellboy, who knows that tentacle gods from beyond time and space are real, refer to something as “a Lovecraft-type scenario.”) And the original additions to the story, like Jo, are flat and not additive. That’s a pity for the movie’s only female character who isn’t damned for all eternity in one way or another. An extended ending turns the comic’s classic Mignola-style Unsettling Reveal Anticlimax into a three-way, last-minute emotional-development action sequence.
But the real problem is that even if Taylor hadn’t made any of those stumbles with Crooked Man, he would still be trying to deform a Hellboy comic — a comics institution defined by highly stylized, sparsely worded, short, disconnected stories — to fit a long-form, visually realistic, gritty film. Crooked Man and 2019’s David Harbour vehicle Hellboy demonstrate that if you directly translate the blow-by-blow plot of a Hellboy story into a new medium without keeping its stylization, brevity, or humor, you just get a watered-down, cliché-filled B-movie with a flat, unlikable protagonist.
It doesn’t matter how many times you have characters say out loud that Hellboy has more in common with the monsters he hunts than the humans he protects. If your actors, director, and screenwriters aren’t united in actually showing the sadness and vulnerability in Hellboy’s heart — never mind the self-aware humor of “Pamcakes!” or “Is that a monkey?” or “Don’t mess with me, lady. I’ve been drinking with skeletons.” — it will mean nothing.
When Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy movies work — and they don’t always! — it’s because they borrow liberally from more action-forward cinematic comics adaptations like Men in Black and contemporary superhero films, stretching the Hellboy model over the skeleton of a tried-and-true three-act action movie while retaining the comic’s humor and pathos. And they work because they have del Toro, the greatest living director of practical-effects monster design in Hollywood today, and veteran camp-action production designer Stephen Scott to give every inch of those two weird, wonderful films a unique design sense that could stand in for the hyperreal effect of Mignola’s cartooning.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man has many problems — so many that they might obscure the most important one. People have got to stop trying to make Hellboy stories fit a movie mold, and start trying to make movies — or TV shows! Or an animated series! — that fit the Hellboy mold.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man is available to purchase digitally on Amazon and Apple TV.
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