Movie Review - Hellboy: The Crooked Man

Soooo yeah, fourth Hellboy movie. Who knew? And honestly, after the catastrophic failure that was the third film, a reboot starring David Harbour that I put myself through here, you have to wonder, who on earth had the balls to put the money up for this? We’ll look at that after a quick synopsis:

1959. On the way back to the BPRD after capturing a funnel spider with a nasty habit of warping reality in its webs, Hellboy and Agent Bobbie Jo Song are detoured into deep Appalachia…where witchcraft is afoot. With two witches fighting over a returning World War II veteran, there looms a larger threat: a malevolent spirit keen on collecting souls…also with an eye on this prodigal son. Can Hellboy and Agent Song keep these forces at bay while young Tom Ferrell redeems himself? Or is the young man past due on his payment to The Crooked Man?

Let’s follow the timeline here: you go from two films by Guillermo del Toro, budgeted $60-66 million on the first, $82-85 million on the second…making nearly $100 million and about $168 million respectively…to a reboot with Neil Marshall budgeted at $50 million yet barely breaking even at $55 million…and someone thinks, “Yeah, let’s give this another shot.” Ballsy. I’m gonna get into a diatribe in a moment that is probably only tangential to the film, but let’s finish what I’m getting at here first. The Crooked Man decides to go the low-budget route…relatively speaking…at $20 million and, to this point, we can only see via Wikipedia that it’s made $2 million at the box office. Granted, this isn’t exactly a fair metric. The only country to release this film into theaters was that hotbed of cinematic…you know what…I can’t even come up with an end to that joke. Belgium. The only country it’s been released in is Belgium. Sigh. Now, it’s available around the world, either as VOD or as a home media release…but that’s the rub, isn’t it? To find it on those platforms…you kinda gotta know it exists in the first place. And I found out about it…umm…maybe late November 2024? More likely December. Only a couple of weeks prior to its release on blu-ray.

Not exactly a coup for the marketing department, eh?

Okay, let’s have a rant about this franchise. You see, there were plans for a third Hellboy to follow up the two GDT films…but here’s the thing: GDT was the writer and director of both of those films. Yes, the first film came almost directly from the comic’s first story and the second film had Mignola, Hellboy’s creator, credited for Story. For…reasons…Mignola worked on a third Hellboy script with co-writer Andrew Cosby tying into the first two films…but leaving GDT out of the loop, offering him a “Producer” credit. Now, if we rewind, we see something similar happened with the Batman franchise at the time of Batman Forever: parties wanted to go in a different direction in spite of the current director and as such, offered said director a “Producer” credit as a way of saying “here, take this money and don’t interfere with what we’re going to do.” The results, in both cases, speak for themselves. This is where I need to step in and defend Neil Marshall. If you haven’t already, watch Dog Soldiers and The Descent (2005). If you’re looking for someone to steer Hellboy into a more horror direction, you could do a hell of a lot worse. So, what happened? Ah, here we have a shining example of the age old Hollywood malady: Producer Interference. Marshall’s cinematographer was fired just to send the director a message that even if he was the director, he was not in charge, producers Lloyd Levin and Lawrence Gordon were. [Kinda like the Salkinds on the Reeve era Superman films. Only douchier. If you can imagine. – Ed.] That’s just the tip of the iceberg, with reports of Levin countering Marshall’s direction with different takes on scenes or the script but ultimately, likely the biggest impact came from the producers taking final cut away, which, as I said, left us a final product that speaks for itself. The lesson here kids? No matter how butt-hurt Mignola must’ve been with the GDT scenario, when you have a visionary like that, you hang on to him. Period.

Wow. A whole page in and I’m not even to the film yet. Anyway, the point of all that is that by the time this film came along, Hellboy was either a forgotten franchise or, at the very least, still the butt-end of jokes pertaining to the third entry. This likely cemented the fact that any future entry was going to be low-budget, if it happened at all. The investors are an interesting lot: Millennium Films started off as a kind of offshoot of Cannon Films…and all that entails, including style of films made. However, they did grow up a bit. Sure, there were still SyFy channel-like creature features and Skin-a-max films, but in this crossover period in the late 90s and early naughts, you had things like the Wicker Man remake with Nicholas Cage, which, well, you certainly can’t make the argument for quality there, but it was definitely high-profile! Most importantly though, Millenium has given us the Expendables franchise, is the current custodian of any Texas Chainsaw Massacre films that spring forth on occasion and some action hits such as Olympus Has Fallen, The Hitman’s Bodyguard and…fuck it, let’s throw the latest Rambo film in there too. And, of course, you have Dark Horse Media pitching in…because…duh…they publish the Hellboy comics.

One of the best things I can say both of the film and of the director, Brian Taylor, is that for the most part, it handles its low budget really well. While we’re largely confined to only a handful of locations within an isolated setting, the film doesn’t feel claustrophobic until it has to. The viewer isn’t wondering what’s happening back at the BRPD, for example, or how Professor Broom is handling what is likely a late check-in from two of his top agents. Instead, our attention is focused on the story at hand and the direction does a lot to keep it there. What locations we do have are able to hold the audience’s interest and while I’ve read some criticisms of the movie’s slow pacing, personally I felt it was important for what would end up being a bit of a slow-burn payoff at the end, as once the action gets started at the church, you really don’t get a chance to catch your breath until toward the end of the film as things start to wrap up. Also helping in this regard is the film’s relatively short running time. Clocking in at only 99 minutes, there’s not a lot of time commitment here and ultimately this limited run time ends up helping the pacing. It also helps that Taylor has some prior experience here. As part of the Neveldine and Taylor writing/directing team, he’s dipped his toe into the comic book movie arena before with Jonah Hex and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. In all fairness, neither one of these films was met with a terribly warm reception (although I had fun with Jonah Hex). This leads me to probably the only downside for The Crooked Man: effects. Now, this criticism doesn’t apply to the practical stuff…the make-ups and such look just fine, it’s CG where this film really shows its low-budget reality. There’s a CG snake in the first act of the film that is…ugh. I know it’s cliché to say “it looked no better than PS2 FMV graphics”…but, yeah…that. The thing is, something like that could’ve been done practically, but I suspect the money to do it that way simply wasn’t there and CG would have to do. There was a second such sequence that I’m having difficulty remembering…but ultimately what I want to say out of this is that even though these individual moments do rip you out of the story for a moment, even if just to point and laugh, Taylor actually rebounds well and the scenes that followed were able to re-establish the atmosphere.

The cast of the film do a good job in helping to maintain that atmosphere as well. Martin Bassindale as the titular Crooked Man conveys the ominous aura he needs to and as his lackey, Effie Kolb, Leah McNamara not only captures an Appalacian twang that gets on your last damn nerve, but weaves it into her mocking and tempting of Tom Ferrell that makes her the most prominent antagonist in the film…and the one audiences are very happy to see her meet her ultimate fate. Adeline Rudolph as Bobbie Jo Song plays an interesting role here, partially our POV character as seemingly our only “normal” person in the film, but as we find out later, it turns out that when you work for the BPRD too long, you can’t help but look where you shouldn’t from time to time. This ends up helping in the end, but Rudolph’s performance convinces us that this is neither easy nor without cost…and it proves quite effective. Of our leading three roles, Jefferson White’s Tom Ferrell at times serves little purpose more than an exposition dump, yet there’s enough of a likeability or, at the very least, an elicitation of sympathy to the point that this primary function in the story doesn’t necessarily define the character…whereas that could certainly be a risk with a different portrayal. Lastly, probably my favorite performance of the film is given by Joseph Marcell as the blind Reverent Nathaniel Armstrong Watts, a man of God stuck in a land that God has seemingly long since abandoned. A keeper of the faith, yet possibly not in the purest sense, he provides heart and humor in scenes desperately in need of them, which he’s able to pull off easily. This ends up making him a great benefit to the film.

Of course, Hellboy gets his own paragraph, as he ends up almost symbolizing what’s good and what’s bad with the film. Let’s start with Jack Kesy, the actor in the role this time. Perhaps the biggest quality he brings to the character is a deeper sense of self-loathing than we’ve seen in the other iterations. This makes sense given that they key ploy the Crooked Man uses against HB is the eternal damnation of his mother and the perpetual torture that comes with it. We’ve gotten hints at this self-loathing in other films, mainly in the explanation of why he files down his horns, but this is the first time we see it on full display. Another thing worth discussing , and it doesn’t happen throughout the movie, but in isolated moments, Kesy really is able to channel Ron Perlman’s intonations. I get that most actors want to bring their own interpretations to a role, but as a fan of the earlier films, the fact he does this at times is a nice tip of the cap. For example, usually whenever the most recent person is who plays Superman is compared to Christopher Reeve, it’s regarded as a high compliment. It’s saying that you’re walking in the footsteps of an actor that is widely perceived as the guy who nailed the assignment…and that’s a very good thing. Of course, as with most comic book movies, the costume does some of the heavy lifting and for the most part, the makeup effects team nail the look just fine. Buuuuuut…the tail. Don’t get me wrong, it looks fine. The thing is, it’s not animated at all. It…dangles. It is not an active participant in the proceedings. And for 90% of the movie, it didn’t even occur to me. if you’re a Hellboy neophyte, you’re likely not even going to think about it but for the fans, this might be a big deal. All things considered, I’m glad they didn’t bring it to life, given how the two instances of CG turned out and the expense of doing it practically may have taken away funds from effects far more vital to the plot. Still, it’s worth knocking points off. Lastly, this film falls into a cliché where of course if there’s a female lead, she’s eventually going to become a love interest. In some ways, I get it…it goes hand in hand with the mother issues and as such finds some Freudian satisfaction on some level. I do have to say though that in recent years I find myself respecting films and their writers that are able to keep this element out of the movie…avoiding the cliché. While I’m glad that there’s no real ‘will they/won’t they’ tension in the film, the fact that we do end up here is a disappointment. Given the time jump, there’s no “hey, what about Liz Sherman?” moments or anything…which for me wasn’t much of an issue anyway as I liked Rudolph’s Agent Song more than Selma Blair’s Sherman. Ultimately, this development doesn’t cost the film any points in my eyes, however I would have liked it more. That said, this entanglement does factor into Kesy’s performance, not entirely reflecting Perlman’s similar situation in the first film, but in the same vein enough where you do feel this is the same character wrestling with the same emotions. All in all, Kesy’s incarnation of Hellboy is a solid performance and, given the nature of the production where even the slightest misstep could draw attention to the fact that this is a low-budget production and drag it down the path of ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ or, even worse, ‘so-bad-it’s-BAD’ territory, that might not be nailing the assignment but it certainly is a pretty good passing grade. Solid B+.

I didn’t have much in the way of expectations for this film. In fact, after the trainwreck that was the last attempt at Hellboy, one could argue that the only way to go was up. That’s not necessarily true per se (it can ALWAYS get worse!), but I’m happy to see that is the case here. Going back to basics with a smaller cast, a smaller story in a confined environment not only helped the budget do everything it needed to while staying within its means, but it also helped keep the story focused and grounded. This forced reality served to amplify the fantastical elements that we do get here. Although a couple of missteps with CG do rip the viewer out of the film’s atmosphere briefly, the strength of the acting, directing and yes, even the slow pacing, manage to create a world that demands your attention. And isn’t that the most you can ask of a film? That said, while it doesn’t have the spit and polish of its big budget siblings, there’s enough here in Hellboy: The Crooked Man to make you hope this isn’t the last time we see Big Red on a feature length adventure.