the crooked man

 The crooked man

I have some sympathy for the creators of Hellboy: The Crooked Man. It can’t be easy, following up a seminal, iconic take on a character by one of the most distinctive, creative directors around. The Dark Horse Comics character and Guillermo Del Toro were a match made in heaven. Bursting with color, personality, and that combination of child-like wonder and unflinching gaze that makes the Mexican filmmaker so iconic, 2004’s Hellboy and its 2008 sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, were prime examples of what comic book films helmed by actual directors used to look like before the Marvel machine spread its life-sucking corporate tendrils far and wide through the industry.Those films cast such a large shadow that I entirely forgot that there had already been a Hellboy reboot film made prior to this year’s The Crooked Man. 2019’s David Harbour-starring Hellboy stands in that shadow, waving demurely and politely asking you to notice and remember it—to no avail, I’m afraid, as I’ve already forgotten it again after typing that sentence. All this is to say that if you’re going to follow up a Del Toro Hellboy, you might as well do something different with it

Directed by Brian Taylor from a script he co-wrote with writer Christopher Golden and Hellboy’s creator Mike Mignola, this story takes us back to the 1950s, where at its outset we join Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and his co-agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) mid-mission on a train travelling through rural Appalachia. It’s not long before things go South and an action-packed sequence involving a chase in the woods and a sometimes-giant-sometimes-tiny spider monster re-introduces us to Hellboy’s laconic and world-weary approach to action heroism. It’s not the worst opening in the world, all things considered. There’s some humor and bounce to the action, and there’s a general sense that this is going to be a smaller story compared to earlier versions.

If I was feeling shady, however, I could say that the line between ‘smaller scale’ and ‘cheap-looking’ begins to blur very early on in Hellboy: The Crooked Man