Hellboy: The Crooked Man

another hellboy movie, not woke, just demonic stuff and a badass cristian protagonist.

Cheap but entertaining.

Cheap is relative: the reported budget for this is enough to shoot a whole Godzilla movie. Still, it’s the cheapest instalment in the Hellboy franchise (as far as I know), and it does show at times, such as the opening sequence, which suffers from average CGI and a very flat-feeling picture. Almost reminded me of the first Evil Dead. Might have been on purpose.

Kesy does a very good job as Big Red, although the make-up, especially the hand, could have been better. They should have dropped the bad CGI and spent the money there. Like animating the tail; the tail was always very expressive.
But Kesy’s got the smack-talking, wisecracking no-frills bad-assery down pat, more than Perlman ever managed.
The mystical Southern mood is pretty well set, and the music is spot on.
The script is classic Mignola Hellboy; it doesn’t get much better than that. The reworked ending has some real good in it.

Now for the bad: the script writers forcefully inserted a DIE hire (DIE, not DEI, I’m old-school like that), because it won’t do to have all white male leads. HB technically is a bright red male, but he was raised white, I suppose.
The original comic by Mignola and Corben is pretty stream-lined, even minimalistic to an extent, and it's a two-seater. The extra character is disruptive and useless in most scenes it appears in. Noisy too. Must be my age showing. Rudolph is quite fetching, but nowhere near enough to make the addition bearable.
She’s not overbearingly girlbossing, and there’s no preaching. It’s an unfortunate in-between, really: the Morally Superior (tm) will see the character as tame and subjugated by The Patriarchy (tm), and the intellectually not-impaired will just wonder, if it serves no purpose, why put it in?
And of course, she saves the day, because of course. Drivel, I tell you, woke drivel! (shakes fist at the sky).

Anybody that's not familiar with the original source material may not recognize the woke. The Asian female character in the movie
is not from the original and a DEI insert for the movie to check boxes. The opening train and spider sequence is also not from the
original and seems to be added to introduce the DEI character. This new character is pointless and adds nothing to the story. Worse
she actually brings it down. All of her dialog and scenes are unnecessary and can be cut out entirely. All of her dialog is pointing things out or explaining something that doesn't require it. The scenes would be more impactful and effective without her rambling or annoying screeching. The final act has her pulling the mine revelation out of her ass and the ensuing ending with her in the mine is pointless, not in the original and is tacked on to give her something to do and finish the spider part off which never should of been in the first place. Speaking of, the whole train opening with the spider is out of place with the rest of the movie. It's like they wanted to start with a big action scene but that's not what the story is or in line with the rest of the film. The CG is terrible where most of the rest is actually pretty good. With a relatively small budget it's a strange decision to waste a chunk of it on something so pointless
other than to set up something for later for the DEI character. It sounds like I hated this and I really didn't. I actually liked it. The acting is
generally good and the atmosphere, lighting and cinematography are excellent. This not a big budget large scale like the previous Hellboy movie were, and it's not supposed to be. It's a small scale, dark gothic horror story that, outside of the previously stated add-ons is very close to the original material. I probably would of rated it a 3.5 given the distracting DEI character but I decided to round up to a 4. If you are familiar with the original Hellboy comics you will probably like this. If your only exposure is the other movie maybe not so much.