Dylan Dog Dead Of Night... Well, It's Better Than Superman Returns, Anyway

The Nateflix Review of Dylan Dog Dead of Night

By Nate Hensley

First of all, let me just preface my review by saying I have no issue with Brandon Routh. I’m well aware that Superman Returns was not his fault. It was Bryan Singer’s fault, and I think we can all agree about that. Routh was just a hungry young actor jumping on the biggest film of his career, the fact the movie was a glass of warm milk is no reflection on him. Since, then, I’ve seen him in small roles in other movies (Unthinkable, Zack and Miri, Scott Pilgrim) and he’s always good. Sure, he’s a little generic, but that didn’t stop Sam Worthington, did it? Or Orlando Bloom?

So, to reiterate, I have no problem with Brandon Routh as an actor, or a human being.

That said, he is all wrong for Dylan Dog Dead of Night.

Routh stars as Dylan Dog, a retired supernatural investigator. See, vampires are real. So are werewolves, zombies, and various other things that go bump in the night. Sort of like True Blood, without the public revelation. Sort of exactly like True Blood, actually. Anyway, the supernatural world always keeps an impartial human investigator on payroll, to snoop into weird cases and keep the beasties honest. But that was then, and now Dog basically does cheating spouse cases.

So, right away you can see the problem with the casting. Routh barely looks old enough to have retired from the soft serve machine at the Dairy Queen, let alone have served the realm of the undead and then retired from that and started a new career. It needs to be an actor with a few miles under his belt, someone that looks like they have seen it all; grizzled and world-weary. Not so clean cut, bright eyed, and bushy tailed.

When a werewolf kills an antiquities dealer, Dog is reluctantly pulled back into his old life. He’s got to navigate a dark world of creepy-crawlies right next to our own, and untangle the mystery before spooky assailants unknown take him down for good.

Dead of Night is decent movie. It’s not good, it’s not bad, but somewhere in between. The story is good enough, the cast is fair, some of the effects are good and others not so much. And Routh does as good a job as he can with the lead, but his casting, like every other aspect of this movie, lacks inspiration. The whole movie is just sort of there, with no aspirations to do anything unique or clever or fun.