‘Dylan Dog: Dead of Night’ is dead on arrival

The movie adaptation of Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, based on the popular Italian comic book series, must have sounded good on paper. It features zombies, vampires and werewolves — three de rigeur creatures that are making a serious return to the box office. But this movie is lifeless for all the wrong reasons, and the blame must fall on the Superman-sized shoulders of Brandon Routh. The actor best known for playing Clark Kent turns in a performance that is one note and terribly uninteresting. It’s a slog to watch him as a detective bridging the world between the living and the undead.

The movie’s plot is the typical lone-star private eye hunting down the baddies, one villain at a time, until the uber-enemy comes out to play. And like so many vampire tales, the proceedings are set on the outskirts of New Orleans. There must be something in the water down there.

Sam Huntington gives it his all as Dylan’s sidekick, Marcus. He is able to produce a few laughs, but nothing much in Dylan Dog registers beyond a smirk. Oddly, there is no love interest in the film, so we are left with a seemingly unmotivated Dylan. What drives this guy? Maybe he’s a zombie, because he certainly doesn’t seem to have a pulse.

Taye Diggs also shows up to give an unusually flat performance as a vampire demi-god; it’s a characterization so weird it’s almost laughably bad.

The problem, beyond Routh’s performance, is that the movie is unsure of its purpose. At times it feels like a cheap knockoff of the far superior Hellboy; at other times, the film feels like it’s pulling from True Blood and Twilight. (I honestly believe that the film’s director Kevin Munroe must be a perpetual watcher of True Blood on HBO; some scenes seem like mirror images. If Dylan Dog as a comic book coined many of these images, then it deserves to be in the film. Otherwise, it feels like sloppy storytelling.)

For such a clunker, the movie sports impressive special effects, especially when Marcus comes back to life as a zombie. But it’s all window dressing. Dylan Dog, which could have been a cool Blade Runner-type film, will be most remembered for its utter woodenness and squandered opportunities.

John Soltes / Publisher

• Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

• 2011

• Directed by Kevin Munroe

• Written by Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer, based on the comic book series by Tiziano Sclavi

• Starring Brandon Routh, Taye Diggs and Sam Huntington

• Running time: 107 minutes

• Rated PG-13 for sequences of creature violence and action, language including some sexual references, and some drug material

• Bubble score: 2 out of 4