Ranking Every Guillermo Del Toro Film From Worst To Best

An adaptation of the Dark Horse comic of the same name, del Toro's initial Hellboy film was a more than valid contender in the comic-inspired landscape of the early '00s. In taking the visuals from the page and translating them to the screen, it was as if del Toro was able to filter the pages through his own eye, keeping the aesthetic from the comics, while also making it all feel distinctly his.

This film also gets bonus points for the absolutely ingenious casting of Ron Perlman as the titular Hellboy. Perlman had been a well-respected character actor for years, but was rarely given lead roles, but here, he took centre-stage and was an absolutely perfect fit for the gruff and often hilarious Son of Satan.

The film is at its strongest when exploring the magical and strange world that Hellboy inhabits and at its weakest when it get too bogged down in the human and mundane.

Alongside Perlman, we are given an audience surrogate in the form of Rupert Evans' John Myers. He is a bland, vanilla wafer of a character, who is there solely to hold our hand through the 'weird' stuff. Everything about the character and the choice to include him scream 'studio mandate', as if the higher-ups thought that audiences would just not be able to comprehend this world without a surrogate.

Luckily for us, del Toro would return to the franchise a few years later, with a great deal more artistic freedom...