Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
That's not to say that director Kevin Munroe (2007's T.M.N.T.) and screenwriters Thomas Dean Donnell and Joshua Oppenheimer (A Sound of Thunder) don't try. They've given the film an offbeat sense of humor that shows through from time to time, and its New Orleans setting is perfect for a story that largely deals with the supernatural, since the movie can take full advantage of its strange superstitions and settings. But the movie's just not fun or exciting, and it never grabbed me. The first big strike against it? Dylan Dog himself is kind of a bore. He's supposed to be a paranormal private eye, whose job is to keep the peace amongst the vampires, werewolves, zombies, and other monsters that secretly walk amongst us. He informs a character at one point that there's a pact these monsters made that keeps everybody in line. If anybody steps out of line, it's his job to take care of it. Sounds interesting. Wonder how he got the gig of protecting the supernatural and human world in the first place? Guess you have to read the comic for that one.
The idea behind Dylan is interesting, but the character himself is anything but. He's underwritten, and exists mainly to be dragged from one end of the plot to the other. He's played in the film by Brandon Routh, who you might remember from another comic book movie a few years ago (Superman Returns). Despite the fact that Dylan's in almost every scene and even narrates the film, we learn very little about him, other than he has a dead fiance in his background story. Routh looks the part of the hero, but he brings no personality or chemistry to the role. Fairing much better is his wise-cracking partner, Marcus (Sam Huntington), who has much more personality, and probably would have made a better hero. Even after he dies, he still has more charisma than Dylan. How so? Early on, Marcus is killed by a zombie. This turns Marcus into one of the living dead, and he spends the rest of the movie dealing with his new zombie state, and trying to get used to it. In one of the film's most clever scenes, he attends a support group for new zombies coming to terms with the fact they're now the living dead. The group believes that even though you're dead, you can still live life to the fullest.
If the movie had been able to have fun with itself like that more often, this probably would have been a better movie. Instead, it gets mired in a nonsensical and labored plot that makes less sense the more you think back on it. Dylan is hired by a young woman named Elizabeth (Anita Briem from TV's The Tudors) to investigate the murder of her father by a beast that broke into their home. He quickly deduces that the culprit is a werewolf, which he finds suspicious, and starts nosing around and asking questions of some of the usual suspects, such as a werewolf and old friend named Gabriel (Peter Stormare) and a shady vampire named Vargas (Taye Diggs). Ultimately, it's revealed that everyone is trying to get their hands on an old artifact that can grant control over a powerful demon. Possession of said artifact could cause a war amongst the different supernatural forces - something Dylan wants to prevent.
Dylan Dog spends too much time having the characters stand around, explaining the plot, instead of having fun with itself. There's too much exposition dialogue, and even when it does try to explain itself, it still sometimes doesn't make much sense. I assumed that much of the info being left out was common knowledge to fans of the comic, but then I read about how vastly different the movie is from the source material, so maybe something got lost in the editing room. Even so, the film is a hollow experience. I didn't buy the relationship between Dylan and Elizabeth, the monsters aren't that interesting, and although he gets off some good one liners, Worthington as Marcus seems to be inhabiting a different movie from everybody else - one that's probably more fun.
See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home