Despite being a low-budget reboot, the 20 million figure of “Hellboy: The Crooked Man` seems even harder to believe than parsing its 20 million price tag. It screams YouTube fan film, not to mention the overreliance on the main plot points of Mike Mignola’s comic of the same name. It is not surprising that Mignola credits as a writer, the fact that Brian Taylor’s name is included as director of the film is quite shocking.
One of the pair who with his screenwriting partner made “Crank” and “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” and also directed his own movie “Mom and Dad,” which was a semi-noir comedy, Taylor managed to create a number of films which rush through everything with lots of energy. “The Crooked Man,” however, contains neither of those features.
After Ron Perlman and David Harbor the perfect candidate for Hellboy, actor Jack Kesy fits into the role of a physically more restrained version of the paranormal agent. If he is wisecracking, it is done more in the context of half-heartedness, and the past memories, which he has certainly been through the mill, do not influence him too much today. Still, the blame for making this rather dull and less interesting and appealing variant of ‘Big Red’ rests with the writer’s script, which has not much of a canvas for Kesy to work his magic.
Hellboy’s latest comic book film finds him in the Appalachian wilderness in 1959 after having fought with a giant spider on a train, which is not significant to the rest of the story, after a BPRD rookie, Jo, gets lost with him. The characters go on to encounter some villagers, who request their assistance since witches and a shady figure named the Crooked Man, who only hints at America’s colonial roots before disappearing, are causing them problems.
Jo, like the train scene, is not in the comics but only features in the scarcely existing movie adaptation. She attends a lot of violence, but her assignment is galaxy-brain twilight during the senseless ‘adventure’ in the woods led by Tom, a distracting and dull ex-soldier. As a trio of wandering companions, the routine sees them encountering folk-horror events, though none of them are accomplished in a vivid manner. The film looks unremarkable and toneless, without a sense of flavor in the action sequences that are few and far between.
The strange practical effect is amusing in its own right, as if a wandering skeleton is putting on a skinsuit, but the rest of the film is full of cliché lines that do not match the picture. Hellboy often talks about the smell of wickedness in the air, or of the forest’s fragrance of death, but the lens rarely shows any of the actual places the characters move around in. They march, meet a witch who is partly out of sight, march some more, and meet another witch: it becomes almost hilarious in its monotonous nature.
At any point, there are no attempts to imitate Richard Corben’s comic book artwork style, which gave a horrifying exaggeration to every page. And this is not replaced with something else. Much is the same with “The Crooked Man”, which lacks any excitement, such as the different visions characters had, which seem more like a tedious requirement than imagination.
The closer to the final encounter with the eponymous antagonist they get, the more it seems that the plot is not that important, and the more it appears that there was not much effort put into crafting it in the first place. Sven Faulconer’s music is effective and adds to the uneasiness of the scenes, but very few aspects, from the lighting, and costume design, to the set design better it.
Vis a vis the earlier parts of the Hellboy Trilogy, “The Crooked Man” suffers from lack of character distinctiveness, or in this case, lack of a distinct personality for the main character and his world. In theory, having a low budget for production should have focused more on the horror aspects of the comic series, but ironically, those have been eliminated. All that is left is the shell of the Hellboy IP.
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