HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN (2024)

Hellboy: The Crooked Man wastes no time in plunging us into its narrative. It doesn’t assume viewers need a lengthy introduction to its protagonist or his sidekick. Fittingly, the entire film feels like an unending action sequence, with breaks from the violence merely window-dressing for the subsequent beatdowns.

Adapted from the limited series comic-book of the same name, The Crooked Man follows the benevolent demon Hellboy (Jack Kesy) in the Appalachian Mountains of the 1950s. Accompanied by rookie agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph), this unlikely duo must brave the demons and ghostly beings that roam this tortured landscape at night. Their quest is to vanquish The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), the region’s resident devil. They are also joined by Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), a native of the area who has returned home for the first time in over a decade.

Tom is a strangely formed creation, a normal man with a haunted past who appears out of nowhere in the narrative. It’s assumed, without any basis, that viewers should care about this inconspicuous fellow’s plight or his lengthy absence from home. Early in the film, before the character has said or shown anything distinctive, a scene involving Hellboy and Bobbie Jo devolves into a conversation between Tom and a resident while the duo linger in the background. This is more than a little awkward and highlights one of the many ways in which The Crooked Man struggles as a literal adaptation of a graphic novel.

Cheesy dialogue and insufferably one-note villains like Effie Kolb (Leah McNamara), an evil witch with all the trappings of villainy but no underlying heart or conviction, are frequent. McNamara’s performance is the worst in the film, with snarls and cries that ring out false notes. Fans of Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy films will undoubtedly be inclined to turn their noses up at this recent movie, especially given the casting of Jack Kesy as the iconic character instead of Ron Perlman. However, Kesy does a fine job with the material he is given, even if the cliché lines work better in written form than spoken aloud. This, along with the film’s scant characterisation and threadbare story, makes it clear why it’s so heavily reliant on action scenes.

To call such events ‘scenes’ is a disservice given their exhaustive (and exhausting) length. The Crooked Man is largely comprised of two sequences that fail to give the impression that they will be nearly as lengthy as they wind up being. Don’t be fooled by the film’s lean runtime of 99-minutes; these sequences are monstrous entities that sag under the weight of their baggage. Watching them is akin to trying to focus on a slower-paced movie while your head is dunked into a bucket of cold water every 30 seconds. Gasping for air while struggling to comprehend the nuances of the narrative, this hypothetical torture method is a mild exaggeration of what watching The Crooked Man is like, where concentration feels like a fruitless, even impossible, endeavour.

It’s not entirely clear if The Crooked Man is aware of the intensity of these seemingly never-ending sequences, but the fact that almost the entire budget is devoted to them is a strong hint. These largely indoor sequences (which, fortunately for the film’s budget and use of lighting, make sense to be depicted during nightfall) feature well-executed action, lighting, and transitions. The daytime scenes, which serve as intermissions to prevent the viewer from feeling like their brain is melting out of their ears and dripping onto their seat from all the action, feature noticeably weak cinematography. A pleasant-looking shot is a rarity, like hunting for Waldo. In the flashback scenes, it’s a similar endeavour, except this time the red-hatted fellow cannot be found in the puzzle, as there are no redeeming qualities to the cheap visual palette on display.

Even though The Crooked Man never attempts to hide the fact that it’s a cliché-ridden, action-packed experience, it still feels toneless and messy. For comic-book fans, this might be a cause to celebrate. It was quite reminiscent of another comic-book series, The Goon, which in some respects reads as a parody of Hellboy (beyond its more general aspirations to satirise noir stories). That comic series engages too frequently in self-sabotage to make for an entertaining feature film, squandering its attempts to build up a narrative so it can convey its humour. In comparison, The Crooked Man feels like the socially awkward offspring of a self-important and satirical approach to noir, one that doesn’t quite know how to get comfortable or what it wants to be. If that means it succeeds in capturing the comics’ essence, it doesn’t translate naturally to film.

The dialogue—and in rare moments the action—in the movie’s more showy scenes was soulless, like Sin City (2005) without the stylisation. But then there were genuinely gripping moments, not just on a technical level, but also in the ways that The Crooked Man showed how isolated these characters were from everything around them even as they stood a few feet apart from one another. The film takes full advantage of this in the latter sequence, with dream sequences tapping into Hellboy and Bobbie Jo’s backstories that are both quite interesting (and genuinely compelling in the case of the former character). But this sense of emotional dislocation also turns it into a disorienting farce at times, where it’s difficult to stay immersed in a 30-minute sequence whose rhythm is so absurdly consistent that it fails to keep engaging the viewer.

That might explain the movie’s horror soundtrack, which, though occasionally thrilling in its simplicity, is so over-used and repetitive that it’s gruelling to sit through. Typically, the tone of horror films can be divided into three realms: calm, rising tension, and the crescendo. But since there’s no tangible way for composer Sven Faulconer to make such distinctions in a movie crowded with nonstop action (and which has virtually no horror elements), the soundtrack crescendos for the majority of The Crooked Man’s runtime. It’s just one of the contributing factors that makes this latest outing in the Hellboy cinematic universe feel like an endurance test.

Several high points benefit greatly by viewing on the big screen, with memorably gruesome imagery. The disturbing moments were so well delivered that The Crooked Man sorely needed more instances of this. Not only would they have more authentically broken up the breakneck pace of its action (the bland, daytime talking scenes are too transparent as lulls in adrenaline to serve this function adequately), but they would have helped ground the silliness of this movie’s antagonists. Some of this ridiculousness is fun, though, with the blind Reverend Nathaniel Armstrong Watts (Joseph Marcell) justifying his existence as a walking, talking cliché through a bombastic performance that delights in excess.

But despite the glimmers of quality storytelling glinting in this dark tale, its grim depictions of the real and supernatural horrors of Appalachia become grating. The film’s constant chaos fails to evoke the anxiety-inducing experience it’s aiming for, instead making The Crooked Man feel twice as long as its runtime.

USA • UK • GERMANY • BULGARIA | 2024 | 99 MINUTES | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Brian Taylor.
writers: Christopher Golden, Mike Mignola & Brian Taylor (based on the ‘Hellboy’ comic-books by Mike Mignola).
starring: Jack Kesy, Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph, Joseph Marcell & Leah McNamara.