Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (Blu-ray / DVD)
Foywonder
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Starring Brandon Routh, Sam Huntington, Taye Diggs, Peter Stormare, Anita Briem, Kurt Angle
Directed by Kevin Munroe
Distributed by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
You know a movie sucks when it gets a wide theatrical release and still makes less money at the box office than Atlas Shrugged: Part 1. You really know that movie sucks when the distributors put it out on Blu-ray completely barebones.
Dylan Dog: Dead of Night was dead on arrival upon being released theatrically earlier this year and with good reason as it’s easily one of the year’s worst. It’s a tonal mess trying unsuccessfully to be a sly mix of classic crime noir, horror, and comedy that’s mostly dull, light on action, as poorly written as it is acted, and you can’t really laugh at its failings because it was already trying to be funny. Worst of all, there are inklings of ideas that could have been made into something that get snuffed out almost as soon as they’re introduced.
The biggest failing is the very character the movie is named after. You have a guy that looks to be at least in his early thirties constantly talking of his past the way a grizzled 50-year old gumshoe would. He talks of giving up his monster investigating gig after the death of his one true love as if it happened ages ago. Everywhere he goes he meets some vampire, werewolf, zombie, whatever that treats him as if he’s someone they haven’t seen in a really long time. He’s old friends with a werewolf mobster old enough to be playing his father. Just how old was Dylan Dog when he became this supernatural private dick?
All of it is rendered moot anyway by Brandon Routh’s non-performance, perhaps the greatest of its kind since John Malkovich in Jonah Hex. Dylan Dog is in almost every scene and always talking, often via voiceover, and rarely does Routh not sound bored to death. The character a movie is named after should never be the least interesting character in that movie. Considering how uninteresting the rest of the cast is that’s quite a feat.
The one and only scene where Dylan Dog ever conveys a cool factor has him fighting a Russian werewolf played by pro wrestler Kurt Angle using silver (brass) knuckles. This movie needed more of that and less of him getting thrown about like a ragdoll in between Ambien-quality monologues.
Which producer was such a Superman Returns fanboy he fooled himself into believing audiences would be thrilled to see Superman and Jimmy Olsen from that film back together again? Sam Huntington again plays sidekick to Routh, this time as his newly zombified sidekick Marcus who is having a rough time adjusting to being undead. Huntington mugs for the camera so much he might as well have pulled out a gun and stolen its wallet. Whereas Routh sleepwalks, Huntington strains so hard to make unfunny material funny he quickly achieved a Marlon Wayans level of irritation in my eyes.
I didn’t have a clue Taye Diggs was even in this movie until he appeared on the screen as an evil vampire. It’s almost as if he got his agent to pull some strings to keep his name out of the marketing of the film as much as possible. Can’t say I blame him.
The lame plot builds around a Dylan Dog investigation, an investigation that consists of him riding around New Orleans questioning various vampires and werewolves, getting ambushed or set-up by their various henchmonsters, and then going back to questioning the same werewolves and vampires again, and then having to fight some of them over again.
Action scenes are over before they get started, the mysteries are so easily resolved they lack intrigue, and if you listened to Dinner for Fiends you already heard me detail the insultingly stupid ending, and, hopefully, already know that there’s no reason to waste your valuable time on this dog of a film.
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