Hellboy’s post-del Toro curse is still in effect.
Hellboy has had a rough go of it on screen. Guillermo del Toro’s baroque beauty and tender affection for the character didn’t fully translate into box office success, and the 2019 reboot came across more like a highlight reel of grotesque imagery than a coherent movie. So, when Hellboy: The Crooked Man was announced, there was cautious optimism. Based on the eerie and atmospheric 2008 miniseries by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben, this adaptation promised a more focused, stripped-back story. Unfortunately, it delivers on that in all the wrong ways.
Set in the Appalachians in the 1950s, the film finds Hellboy (Jack Kesy) assisting a local man, Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), whose past dealings with the occult have unleashed a powerful evil. The plot is a tight, spooky little affair, with a return to the folkloric horror roots of the comics. There’s no sprawling mythology here, no monsters battling in CGI maelstroms – just Hellboy, Tom, and the sinister presence of The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), a villain whose leering charm is the closest thing the film has to a heartbeat.
Visually, The Crooked Man goes for a grimy, desaturated aesthetic that captures the poverty and isolation of the backwoods setting, but it ends up feeling more like a colour palette cribbed from a student film trying too hard to be edgy. There’s a staleness to the whole affair – a sense that everyone’s been told to dial it down to match the setting, but no one’s quite sure what to do with the resulting void.
Jack Kesy’s Hellboy lacks the offbeat charisma of Ron Perlman or even the brute-force appeal of David Harbour. He’s serviceable, but there’s an absence of the sardonic wit and weariness that defines Hellboy as more than just a big red punch machine. His chemistry with Jefferso White’s Tom is functional at best, which is a problem since their dynamic is central to the film. And despite being based on one of the most celebrated Hellboy storylines, the film fumbles its pacing, lingering too long on its bland setup and rushing through its third act as if everyone realised they were running out of time.
Martin Bassindale, as the titular Crooked Man, is easily the standout. His performance is restrained, yet unsettling, embodying the kind of creeping dread that made the original comic so effective. But even he can’t save a script that seems afraid to commit to its own potential. What could have been a tight, eerie supernatural thriller gets bogged down by limp dialogue and a lack of real tension. Instead of embracing the skin-crawling horror that the Appalachian setting practically begs for, it’s content to trot out familiar beats without the bite to back them up.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man had the potential to bring Hellboy back from the cinematic wilderness, but instead, it feels more like a footnote than a resurrection. The Crooked Man may be bent, but it’s the film’s lack of spine that ultimately undoes it.
