‘Hellboy: The Crooked Man’ Review: But Why?

I have some sympathy for the creators of Hellboy: The Crooked Man. It can’t be easy, following up a seminal, iconic take on a character by one of the most distinctive, creative directors around. The Dark Horse Comics character and Guillermo Del Toro were a match made in heaven. Bursting with color, personality, and that combination of child-like wonder and unflinching gaze that makes the Mexican filmmaker so iconic, 2004’s Hellboy and its 2008 sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, were prime examples of what comic book films helmed by actual directors used to look like before the Marvel machine spread its life-sucking corporate tendrils far and wide through the industry.

Those films cast such a large shadow that I entirely forgot that there had already been a Hellboy reboot film made prior to this year’s The Crooked Man. 2019’s David Harbour-starring Hellboy stands in that shadow, waving demurely and politely asking you to notice and remember it—to no avail, I’m afraid, as I’ve already forgotten it again after typing that sentence. All this is to say that if you’re going to follow up a Del Toro Hellboy, you might as well do something different with it.

Directed by Brian Taylor from a script he co-wrote with writer Christopher Golden and Hellboy’s creator Mike Mignola, this story takes us back to the 1950s, where at its outset we join Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and his co-agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) mid-mission on a train travelling through rural Appalachia. It’s not long before things go South and an action-packed sequence involving a chase in the woods and a sometimes-giant-sometimes-tiny spider monster re-introduces us to Hellboy’s laconic and world-weary approach to action heroism. It’s not the worst opening in the world, all things considered. There’s some humor and bounce to the action, and there’s a general sense that this is going to be a smaller story compared to earlier versions.

If I was feeling shady, however, I could say that the line between ‘smaller scale’ and ‘cheap-looking’ begins to blur very early on in Hellboy: The Crooked Man.

But I’m not, so I won’t.

To the filmmaker’s credit, a more compact scale is clearly one of the ways that they intended to differentiate themselves from Del Toro’s films, and that does seem like a smart approach if you do have to go down this road. This Hellboy story shrinks things down to a just a few locations set inside a small settlement in the Appalachian woods. There’s a church, a witch (or more, I think?), and some demonic goings on, and that’s mostly it. There’s a greater emphasis on a horror vibe here too, which I appreciated in theory. The mood is grimmer and the tree branches close in, twisted and gnarled. All of this would be great if the execution matched the intent.

Unfortunately, the finished product is a mess: Poorly paced, confused, boring, and just so ugly. It can be a real struggle sometimes, picking an image from a film to choose as the header for its review, but here it was effortless, and a blessing, because that picture up there—go on, scroll up, look at it again—sums up the entirety of Hellboy: The Crooked Man. I might as well have not written a review. I could just say, ‘Look at it.’ Starring in a film completely drained of color for some reason, this film’s Hellboy looks less like a larger than life demonic superhero and more like that bloke down the pub who’s been there since opening and who’s trying to talk to you at the bar about how he’s not really sure about all this 5G business. He’s not making any sense, and even he looks bored with his own spiel. That extends to the film as a whole. Silly and portentous at the same time, a strange, misbegotten beast wandering alone in the fog, devoid of all the energy that director Brian Taylor brought to his Crank films, Hellboy: The Crooked Man doesn’t need to exist.