‘Hellboy’

Starring: Ron Pearlman, Selma Blair, David Hyde Pierce

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro

3.5 out of 5

An old maxim in show business is that a final product is 90 percent casting.

When director Guillermo del Toro (‘Blade 2,’ ‘The Devil’s Backbone’) became attached to Mike Mignola’s gothic comic property Hellboy, rumor had it that studio heads wanted someone bankable under the red body paint and sawed-off horns. Hot off of ‘The Fast and the Furious,’ the wooden Vin Diesel became the instant front runner.

Diesel was the natural choice, but not del Toro’s. Chiseled veteran character actor Ron Pearlman was. The quest to hire a man – one who never met a casting description with the words ‘rough and tumble’ that he didn’t like – became a holy crusade for Guillermo.

‘Every time I told a studio that I needed an $85 million budget and Ron Perlman, they’d validate my parking and send me on my way,’ the director told The Edmonton Sun last March.

He tried and tried and tried until he got his way. Thank God he won. It is because of Pearlman that ‘Hellboy’ turned out the way it did.

The film tells the tale of a demon that crossed over to our world during a Nazi attempt to open the gates of hell only to be raised by a secret government agency as a tool to fight ‘things that go bump in the night.’ It’s easily a cut above most comic-based movies, and arguably the best genre film ever.

As the title character, Pearlman plays an incredibly likable tool of the devil. Since he ages roughly four times slower than humans, the now over-60-year-old Hellboy is really only an early-20-something at heart. He pines for fellow special forces member (and all around fox) Selma Blair and quarrels with his ward, the professor who took him under his wing all those years ago, like any 22-year-old who never left home.

It is Pearlman though, that sells this. The good nature of the character could have easily been played with less humanity, and the film would have fallen apart. So much is told through his reactions alone. One knows that he has been through his job so many times by the response he gives to a drooling, hissing monster: about the same as a Taco Bell worker who has just been requested to get a burrito supreme.

Also, the monsters are awesome and the large majority of the special effects are flawless. With all of this going for it, I don’t know how the inevitable sequel could get any better.

Unless of course Vin Diesel is free.

Published on April 1, 2004 at 12:00 pm