Hellboy: The Crooked Man

There is a brief discussion early in this flick about Hellboy’s striking appearance and whether or not he looks like the devil. 

One character is certain he knows the truth.  

“I met that son of a bitch. He don’t look nothing like you.”

Ahh if only the rest of the movie had been that good. Fans of Hellboy comics know that it is a genius work that melds horror and superheroes and folklore from all over the world. 

Creator Mike Mignola has never been satisfied with the filmed versions of his singular creations. The original Hellboy movie from 2003 was excellent and it was one of those movies (5 years before Iron Man) that proved that comic book movies that were faithful to the source material could really work. 

It looked right and Ron Perlman was the perfect person to play him. 

We got a second Hellboy movie a few years later with diminishing returns (still pretty great though) and the studio wouldn’t fund a third to cap it off with a proper trilogy. 

Mignola tried a reboot in 2019, starring David Harbor and contradicting at least one big thing that happened in the first movie. 

It failed. 

And now this. A smaller bite at the apple, that faithfully recreates a three issue comic The Crooked Man written by Mignola and drawn by the late Richard Corbin. 

This movie is so faithful to the comic it even sticks in a one page gag about the creation of withballs that was done using a character similar to The Crone from EC Comics. 

Sadly, the path from page to screen is fraught with problems and devils on all sides. 

Most of this just doesn’t work. The soundtrack is meant to be scary, I suppose, but it’s just generic and annoying. 

Jack Kesy does what he can but he’s just not the right guy for this character. 

And even at one hour and forty minutes this is way too long. I have long said that the perfect Hellboy movie would be a series of vignettes. You could take Mignola’s 20 page stories (sometimes much shorter sometimes a little longer) and just string the best of them together into an excellent film. 

Of course, I realized today that what I’m actually describing is television. 

Maybe someday, someone will look at the brilliant comic and come up with the budget and actors who can turn it into the X–Filesesque show it could be for a new generation.