Movie Review — ‘Hellboy: The Crooked Man’

Welcome to the table,

If you enjoy Hellboy comics, there is a pretty good chance you are really going to enjoy Hellboy: The Crooked Man. From the dialog to the framing to the pacing of the narrative, the film feels about as close to a Hellboy comic as something can feel.

>>>Spoilers Beyond This Point<<<

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is the newest cinematic offering featuring Mike Mignola‘s most iconic character. This go-around, Hellboy is played by Jack Kesy and is accompanied by Adeline Rudolph as agent Bobbie Jo Song.

Kesy brings something to the role that feels very much akin to the Hellboy from the early days of the comic. It’s hard to explain without conjuring other actors who have played the role, so I’m going to do that only to make the point I am trying to make. Ron Perlman in the role felt like a cinematic version of Hellboy. He was big, bombastic, and charming in a way you expect the leading man in a movie to feel.

He had this wry smile and a soft, troubled thing going on that was wonderful and compelling and charming. The comics Hellboy is kind of a dork. He’s tough as nails and has some insightful moments, but at the end of the day, this is the guy who just leaps into battle and yells at people because he has been drinking with skeletons. He’s not really the typical “leading man” heroic type, he’s a bit reluctant and simple and he is doing a job because it’s his job to do.

Kesy’s Hellboy does a fantastic job of playing the comic version of this character in a way that feels so perfectly tuned that I would watch ten seasons of this man playing Hellboy in some high-budget streaming show just to get more of him in this role. It’s not the muscle-bound superhero version of the character David Harbour played in the 2019 movie. It’s something he made totally his own by just playing Hellboy as a guy who happens to be the child of the Devil and a witch who works for an organization that deals with paranormal happenings.

In a way, the past actors have made Hellboy great, but sort of larger than life and almost superhero-like. In that way, a guy in a blue and red skin-tight suit with a cape feels out of place in a normal world, but Kesy’s version of Hellboy feels so grounded and lived in. When you are a big red dude with a giant stone hand wandering around with humans, that is incredible, and honestly a very, very cool feat to pull off. The man deserves awards for the way he plays this bright red demon in a trench coat so normally that he comes off like a simple everyman kind of guy having a bad day thanks to his job going off the rails and now he has to deal with it.

Kesy, while an absolute superstar for his performance, also has a webwork of solid actors to play off of, Rudolph as Bobbie Jo Song really brings that supporting character vibe you normally get from Kate Corrigan in the comics. She is her own entity, for sure, but the role feels very familiar in the space and the occult touches she brings are fantastic. There is a great chemistry and it bleeds through the story in a way that does not feel forced or awkward.

Joseph Marcell, who got a “Wait a second, is that Jeffery?!” from me, really lives in the role of the blind Reverend Watts. He brings a fun energy to the story that, again, I will keep saying this, feels like he walked out of Mignola’s panels and into the living breathing world. The chemistry between Leah McNamara as the cursed witch Effie Kolb and Jefferson White as Tom Ferrell is also delightful as it dances this weird frantic line of manifesting guilt and chaos spirit and guy who just wants to do right by his dead family and if he can move on.

The music in this film also really deserves to be called out. It offers so much to help create the tone and the general feel of things. They could have gone a ton of directions with it, but it feels like what was pulled together is so sonically perfect that I would hate to watch this without sound because it brings so much to the table and does such a wonderful job of pulling all the threads together.

The atmosphere of this film is fantastic, staying very grounded even when introducing undead and giant spiders or witches husks and the creepy Crooked Man himself. It’s all got that visual consistency and framing with large patches of shadow and sharp angles you come to expect reading Hellboy books.

I can’t stress enough that this feels like the most Hellboy thing I have seen on film. I’m saying that as someone who cried as the opening narration played in the first Guillermo Del Toro Hellboy movie because I was so happy, or who had a friend carry me down a flight of stairs so I could go, fresh out of surgery, to Best Buy to buy the animated Hellboy movie when it dropped on day one. I’m the audience for this film, and while all the other versions are really wonderful, and I love them and am glad we have them, this feels the most faithful to the source.

I don’t know what is happening in theaters these days. The last time I went, some church group was in the theater next to the one I was in, and during the quiet parts of the movie we could hear their music and praying really loud. For me, hitting a theater has lost a lot of the joy it used to have because I can watch a movie in the comfort of my own home. I would have gone to see this in theaters had it come to the one near me. Watching it on my own TV was rad, and I loved seeing it, but I for sure would have shelled out however much tickets are, and then three times ticket prices for some prepackaged nachos and a bottle of water. If the local independent theater picks this up in a year or two, I will go see it there.

I’m a Hellboy fan. I love the comics, I love the concept, and being 100% honest with you, I love this movie.

Until next time, “I am the heebie-jeebies” was the moment for me where I knew we were in good hands with this film.