Updated Friday, September 12, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By Paul Brownfield, Los Angeles Times

Hellboy II: The Golden Army 地獄怪客2:金甲軍團

His face is a triptych of granite-like features. When the camera focuses on Ron Perlman, it captures, with clarity, the sum of his distinguished parts — the lantern jaw, the deep-set eyes and the high, square forehead. Perlman is 6 feet 2, which hardly conveys the berth he has occupied on-screen over the years, in movies such as 1982’s “Quest for Fire,” where he played a Neanderthal, and 1995’s surrealist French film “City of Lost Children,” where he was a tender circus strong man. The movies, though, have exaggerated his features, so much so that you half-expect to be be lunching with a giant. While physically imposing, the actor who walked into a West Hollywood eatery the other day was not, technically, huge. Wearing jeans and an untucked shirt, Perlman made his way to the table with a slight limp, the result of a broken toe he suffered on the Budapest, Hungary, set of “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” which opened Friday and earned US$35,885,000, ranking No. 1 at the box office. It has been Perlman’s semi-obscure fate to exist, on camera, under layers of carefully applied grotesquerie. This includes the TV series “Beauty and the Beast,” which gave him a kind of folk fame 20 years ago.

“Hellboy II: The Golden Army” — in which Perlman battles a vengeful prince of darkness, a mammoth troll, flesh-eating tooth fairies and that hellacious army of the subtitle — required three hours in the makeup chair on a good day, Perlman said, six hours on other days. But one senses that Perlman has finally found all the artifice to be liberating. No other role has gotten to the core of his personality — or done nearly so much for his career — as Hellboy, the benevolent but churlish demon with a blue-collar ethos and freak-show brawn, first shepherded from the pages of Mike Mignola’s graphic novels to the big screen in 2004 by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro.

It was Perlman’s physical resemblance to the comic book Hellboy — the heavy brow, angular head and imposing presence — that made him an ideal muse for the director. And with “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” del Toro, riding the wave of his Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth,” seems even freer to mine the dichotomy of his main character. The “Hellboy” legend is a nurture-over-nature paradigm. Hellboy, after all, should have been all evil — brought to Earth by Nazi occultists to be an agent of doom, only to end up working for the good guys at a top-secret government hideout (it’s in New Jersey) in the battle against paranormal malevolence. Down in his messy room of an antechamber, the beast becomes, via the love of his adoptive, government scientist father (John Hurt), a physically indestructible weapon and peckishly human.

Yes, Hellboy is red, massive and has a tail, but he shaves his horns to fit in. He has a fondness for house cats. He talks like a hard-boiled detective. He watches too much TV and eats a great many pancakes. And his mood is entirely dictated by how things are going with his enduring love Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), the life partner who can morph into a fireball.

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	His face is a triptych of granite-like features. When the camera focuses on Ron Perlman, it captures, with clarity, the sum of his distinguished parts — the lantern jaw, the deep-set eyes and the high, square forehead. Enlarge Photo

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