Here we are, then: Hellboy take three. After Guillermo del Toro’s superb 2004-to-’08 double bill and Neil Marshall’s bloated 2019 attempt to take things into harsher action-horror territory, we now get the purist’s approach. Directed by Brian ‘Crank’ Taylor, who also co-wrote the script with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola (drawing heavily on his limited-edition series), Hellboy: The Crooked Man strips away the fantastical spectacle and brings its diabolic hero down to ground level, as it were, in a gritty low-fi chiller.
Similarly to Matt Reeves’ The Batman, there’s thankfully no attempt to re-tell Hellboy’s origin story. We’re just dropped right into another day at the office — or rather field trip — picking up with Red and his obligatory attractive-female sidekick (Adeline Rudolph) while they’re transporting a magically mutated funnel-web spider from A to B. Shit swiftly goes south in a little train-crash/monster-tussle set-piece that’s fun enough to forgive the evident limitations of the VFX and offer some hope for what follows. However, once the main plot kicks in, that hope quickly dissipates.
The problem is, with the reduced scale, there’s also an acute lowering of stakes. Whereas previously we saw a guy who was created to end the world having to save that world (which understandably hates and fears him), here he’s just messing inconsequentially around with a local supernatural annoyance in a barely populated cranny of Nowheresville.
Feels less like a fresh movie than a lost pilot for a ’90s monster-of-the-week TV show.
Oddly, its residents don’t bat an eyelid when this burly, red-tailed devil-bloke rocks up, a response blithely explained away by a passing reference to Hellboy’s recent appearance in Life magazine. It removes all the tension you’d expect from his inherent outsider presence, a dramatic weakness only exacerbated by a lurch-paced flurry of exposition-laden scenes involving witches, a magic cat bone and a prosthetics-slathered baddie, who looks like a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Waldorf from The Muppets.
Our new, conspicuously slimline Hellboy is Jack Kesy, probably best known as Black Tom Cassidy in Deadpool 2. Sadly, unlike Ron Perlman or David Harbour, Kesy lacks the requisite screen presence to shine through the heavy make-up, and spends most of the movie gruffly grunting and smoking in a strangely annoying manner. Meanwhile, Taylor over-relies on a narrow range of visual tricks (primarily smeary fish-eye lenses) which only add to a sense of confusion as we’re shunted between disconnected scenes via the occasional, seemingly random inter-title.
Perhaps die-hard Hellboy-heads will get something out of The Crooked Man, but it feels less like a fresh movie than a lost pilot for a ’90s monster-of-the-week TV show that never made it to air.