Crooked Man embraces Christian values ​​in the fight against evil

(REVIEW) “Hellboy: The Crooked Man” is a surprisingly entertaining crime/horror film that assumes a shocking amount of Christian beliefs in its narrative.

Hellboy is a strange character with a checkered cinematic history. Based on a comic book series written by Mike Mignola, Hellboy is the son of a demon and a witch who was brought from hell to the world by the Nazis. He was rescued and raised by BPRD (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) Professor Broom who became his surrogate father and trained to help save the world from monsters just like him.

The character has been adapted into film several times before. Twice in live-action by Guillermo del Toro (“Hellboy” 2004 and “Hellboy II: The Golden Army”), in what was to be a planned trilogy. But the modest box office performance of those films made the studio decide to turn to a reboot of the franchise in 2019 with a film called “Hellboy” that became an even bigger critical and commercial failure than its predecessors.

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Now, Hellboy is back on screens, but on a much more modest scale of $20 million (previous budgets were $66 million for “Hellboy,” $85 million for “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” and $50 million for “Hellboy, 2019”) the film features far fewer monsters, characters, fight scenes and a shorter duration (1 hour and 39 minutes). While the other films were released in cinemas worldwide, this one was released in UK cinemas but went directly to digital in United States of America.

“Hellboy: The Crooked Man” follows the titular hero as he and a new field agent are caught in the crossfire of townspeople and witches after a routine mission goes awry. Things take a turn for the worse when they encounter the “Crooked Man”, an undead minion of the devil who grants people wishes in exchange for their souls.

You can definitely see the budget cut in the film. The number of monsters portrayed and the quality of the effects are much closer to a CW show or a high caliber YouTube fan film than a Hollywood blockbuster. Far from weakening the film, these changes somehow made it one of the best Hellboy projects. This movie cuts out a lot of fat that can distract from the main appeal of Hellboy and focuses on what actually makes him cool and unique.

Hellboy – at its core – is a crime procedural set in a horror movie universe, with one of the monsters on the side of the good guys. Like “Jaws,” “Crooked Man” focuses on the terror of the monsters in the dark and leads to their attacks on the heroes, making the horror elements stronger. When Hellboy starts fighting monsters, it feels cathartic and won. And because he’s not trying to fit five different emotional arcs into Hellboy, the most interesting one (he struggles with his evil instincts and parentage) comes into sharper focus. The film can really build on the genre tropes that make the concept so powerful, rather than distract from them. The old rookie cop; the hero and the villain; the sinner and the saint.

Of course, while most of the time budget constraints work, not always. Some bad CGI is visible and some shooting choices are distracting. In one scene, they have Hellboy doing the same move where he puffs on his cigar every time they cut him.

At the same time, what’s most interesting about The Crooked Man is how Christian it is. Christians tend to be put off by characters like Hellboy because they seem to make demons (the bad guys of Scripture) into good guys. Similar to the fear of Harry Potter involving children in witchcraft, Christians have stayed away from such film franchises. And while that’s true to an extent, it’s more complicated than that. In the “Hellboy” movies, demons and monsters are the bad guys. And Hellboy’s demonic heritage is a source of pain for him. In this sense, Hellboy has always affirmed the evil of demons and monsters.

But the previous films also emphasized how monsters are misunderstood and that the people who persecuted them were, to a certain extent, the real bad guys. In “The Golden Army”, we are told that humans and fantastic creatures lived together in harmony until greedy humans tried to take over everything and started the war between humans and elves (and other mythical beings). And the goblins were, according to the movie, the ones who stopped the war out of compassion for the humans.

Likewise in 2019’s “Hellboy.” rebooted, humans and monsters lived in harmony until the humans betrayed them.

Both films also show how ordinary people hate and fear Hellboy and monsters like him. This creates a tension: should he really be on the side of the people? Or become the king of monsters where people will respect him?

Also, in the previous “Hellboy” films there is little acknowledgment that Christianity is a force (let alone the main force) that can fight these dark enemies. The heroes who oppose the “things that go bump in the night” are government entities that fight monsters, a combination of science and the very forces of magic that they often fight against.

“Hellboy: The Crooked Man” gives no such moral ground to demonic creatures. In The Crooked Man, the villains are the devil and those who chose to serve him. Satan is unequivocally evil. And none of his minions, like Crooked Man and Elfie, are portrayed as being unjustly persecuted. These people are not bad because people fear and hate them. People fear and hate them because they are evil. Rather, the moral complexity comes from the fact that the temptation to evil to which they succumbed is also present in the heroes.

This is especially noticeable when depicting witches and sexual sin. It’s popular today to portray witches—or people accused of being one—as the good guys, and the bad guys are the Christians who burn them. It’s also popular to portray Christians as oppressive wimps for being against sleeping around. But the film unironically portrays witchcraft as an evil that consigns people to Satan and slavery (with one exception, which I’ll discuss below). And it uncritically portrays “fornication” as something that ties you to the devil’s control in some way. They even combine these elements by using the trope of the witch as a sexual temptress – something often condemned as a sexist projection on the part of men.

This means that Hellboy’s arc is less about being a misunderstood victim of man’s intolerance and more about struggling with his own sinful nature. This fits with narratives that are much closer to the heart of traditional Christian teaching. Christianity teaches that we are all born sinners and that we must fight against our sinful nature every day. Hellboy was literally born the son of a witch and the devil. And yet, he wants to be a good person. How does he do what is right when his instincts are literally from Hell? This reminds us of what Saint Paul said: “For the good that I will I do not; but the evil I do not want, I do. … Oh, what a wretch I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:19, 24, KJV version).

Hellboy is also a particularly masculine expression of this problem. As Nancy Pearcy points out in The Toxic War on Masculinity, Western Christianity has associated femininity with Christian values ​​and masculinity with sinful nature since the Industrial Revolution. Jesus—and therefore Christian virtue—became associated with “gentle, meek, and gentle Jesus.” Therefore, men, who tend to identify more with warrior king archetypes, feel those instincts as closer to the darkness they are trying to confront. The question then is, how does Hellboy reconcile his aggressive instincts (which he must use to fight monsters) with his morals and not give in to the dark side because of them?

In The Crooked Man, Christianity is also seen as true and strong against this darkness. Demons and witches cannot be on church grounds. A consecrated shovel with a cross inscribed on it can destroy demons. The blind pastor is portrayed as a good man able to resist the temptation of the devil and help him fight.

There is only one thing that prevents this movie from being a straight up Christian faith movie. Bobby Jo Song uses a spell to sabotage the villains. It’s a common trope in Hellboy: the heroes use magic and the same goes for the villains. But it is commonly understood in Christianity that witchcraft is evil, as evidenced in Deuteronomy 18:9-12). That doesn’t make this a bad movie, but I have to admit that there’s a part of me that wishes I could annoyingly tell people that “The Crooked Man” was ironically a Christian movie.

It’s a fascinating trend that some of these old tropes are making a comeback. While history was full of “bad guys are actually the good guys” stories — from vampires in “Twilight” to witches in “Wicked” and “Sabrina” — now we have movies like “Salem’s Lot” and ” Nosferatu”. ” that flipped the script.

Why? There might be something to the fact that many of these films are adapted from older stories. “Nosferatu,” “Salem’s Lot” and “Hellboy: The Crooked Man” are all based on stories written before the deconstructive trend that became popular in Hollywood. In this case, the obsession with recycling materials from the past brings back old tropes that have gone out of fashion.

I suspect it is also because the old stories still have a power and resonance that has not yet been replaced in our society. The idea of ​​demons tempting us to evil, to which we often succumb out of weakness, still resonates with our daily experiences. The idea of ​​the witch who succumbed to this lust for power and self-destructed also still resonates. The idea of ​​being tempted from the right path by someone through sexual attraction still resonates.

While the budget often shows, and not all of the artistic choices work, “Hellboy: The Crooked Man” is a very enjoyable mash-up of various genres that’s only better for how Christian — and also how true — it is. .