Hellboy: The Crooked Man review - back to its comic book roots

It’s been 20 years since Ron Pearlman and Guillermo del Toro brought a dark horse into the light with the original Hellboy movie. Yet despite earning himself a sequel and a slightly maligned soft reboot starring genre darlings David Harbour and Mila Jovovich, Hellboy has long struggled to sustain mainstream appeal. But now Big Red is back with Crank director Brian Taylor in the driving seat and original Hellboy creator Mike Mignola proudly riding shotgun. Hellboy: The Crooked Man arrives as an altogether different beast – darker, weirder, scarier, and more attuned to Mignola’s original comic book on which it’s based.

Indeed, fans of the original Dark Horse Hellboy run will delight that Hellboy: The Crooked Man is a faithful adaptation of the original story, with lines and tableaus lifted right off the page, giving the movie a new level of authenticity. As such, the movie plays out like a serialised comic, complete with procedural storytelling. This may jar the average moviegoer (though should delight the comic fans) but it shouldn’t. Tightly scripted and efficiently edited, it simply trusts the audience to interpret the story as it’s laid out.

Set in the Appalachian mountains in 1959, Hellboy and rookie agent Bobbie (Adeline Rudolph) are stranded following a botched mission, desperately searching for a way to get back to The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.R.P.D). During their search, they come across a forest cabin where one of the occupants has been seemingly bewitched. Seeing a family and community in need, the pair start to investigate with the help of returning local Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White). They soon uncover the town has long been plagued by witches at the behest of the devil himself, who appears as the titular Crooked Man, with all roads pointing to a showdown between the Spawn of Hell and the Lord of Darkness.

Lightened by a lack of exposition, we are dropped straight into the action, slap bang in the middle of a day in the life of Hellboy. Despite the lack of spoonfeeding, it’s easy to pick up the threads as Hellboy acts as a proxy for the audience, a passenger in his own movie. Still, his very stoic presence provides an anchor to the chaos and general witchy weirdness that’s going on all around him.

Speaking of which, Hellboy: The Crooked Man is a horror movie at its heart. It’s packed with jump scares and uncomfortably stark imagery that will shock and stay with you. Hallmarks of tone from director Brian Taylor’s work on the TV show Happy is clear in the movie and with Hellboy: The Crooked Man it’s certainly a case of perfect pairing of artist and material. Taylor takes great care to retain Hellboy’s gruffly loveable anti-hero vibe, and even provides some deeply dark contextual backstory that only goes to reinforce the more hard nosed aesthetic.

Jack Kesy is admirable as a replacement for Ron Pearlman and David Harbour as Hellboy. Though he may lack some of the on-screen charisma that his predecessors brought, Kesy’s underplayed and measured deliveries of Big Red’s signature one-liners successfully bring the iconic character to life on the big screen.

It’s clear to see that Hellboy: The Crooked Man hasn’t been afforded the budget it deserves. It lacks the sheen of the Hollywood blockbuster treatment Guillermo del Torro and Neil Marshall’s enjoyed. This unfortunate dilution of expected finesse means that at times it can look suspiciously more like a fan-film than a sanctioned production. But at its core is a story that really lands, it’s unhinged as hell and holds a confidence in its characters that is unshakable, and when it really matters, the CGI shines, adding supernatural splendour to the uncomfortably delicious horrors.

Icon Film Distribution presents Hellboy: The Crooked Man out now on 4K Special Collector’s Edition, Blu-ray, DVD & Digital. Read our interview with Hellboy himself, Jack Kesy, here.

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