Del Toro In Love

Rating: 8/10 (19 September 2004)

It's hard not to love Guillermo Del Toro as a human being: he exudes so much giddy optimism and love of his craft as to be contagious. His love of monsters, outsiders and more recently Mike Mignola's Hellboy has informed his own films for a long time and now, he gets to go back to his roots.
Hellboy is not a superhero comic, but it is a perfect world and hero for the comic medium. It has a very tricky tone, a blend of hard boiled thriller and B-movie action, mixed with Lovecraftian lore and a fascination for the occult. Its visual style, a significant part of its success, is no less difficult to translate effectively to the screen. Taken as a whole, it is easy to see why Del Toro would be instantly smitten, and it is admirable how many years of his career have been a series of strategic decisions to enable him to one day adapt this property. After showing his action chops with Blade II and horror mastery with The Devil's Backbone, he received a very timid green-light.
While he has made concessions to a wider audience by anchoring his film with one completely human everyman main character - serving as a gateway - and introducing a love story absent from the source material, Del Toro's otherwise stubborn loyalty to the comic is laudable: the tone is spot on, the look and designs are a beautiful blend of Mignola's and Del Toro's very compatible sensibilities, and Guillermo Navarro's photography often evokes the comic's hard contrast and rich primary colors.
The real coup is in the casting, and again we can thank Del Toro for standing his ground: he reportedly refused a significantly higher budget by turning down other potential leading men. Thank the stars, because Ron Perlman was born to be Hellboy, a transformation further aided by amazing makeup effects. He is ably supported by a very emo Selma Blair, the always wonderful John Hurt, and the Doug Jones/David Hyde Pierce combo behind fish-man Abe Sapien. On the antagonist-side, we have an inspired collection of freaks, chiefly Kroenen, cinema's finest SM-Nazi-ninja-zombie. How can a movie featuring such a delicacy not be worth a look?
Story-wise, things are a bit less than elegant at times, but the love and care at play often more than compensates, and you get the feeling the people behind this film probably thought this was the only chance they'd ever get to make a Hellboy film. As it turns out, they were wrong, and this is a perfect appetizer to the wonderful part II.
Much like the source comic, it is a bit of an acquire taste, but its wide-eyed, unapologetic geekiness is worth treasuring.