Watch Dylan Dog - Victim of Circumstances For Free

Simply A Masterpiece

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Is it fair to judge what is essentially a fan movie with the same criteria one would use for a major Hollywood production? Probably not, and that's why I am giving this a tentative pass rather than bashing it. Let's say it feels like a lightweight episode of some minor TV series (apart for the actors' mostly atrocious diction); Dylan Dog fans might get a kick out of bits and pieces of it. At least it does attempt to capture the spirit of the source material, unlike the recent Brandon Routh "adaptation".Dylan Dog is an interesting phenomenon. The comic book created by Tiziano Sclavi subverts the image of the hardboiled occult detective with its thirty-something idealistic protagonist affected by a major case of Peter Pan syndrome: a down-and-out fussy geek, shy casanova and phobia-ridden investigator who dislikes using violence, screams like a little girl and inhabits a narrative world which is a homage-heavy love letter to horror cinema and literature. As difficult to write as comic book characters get - in fact, after a writer's block by Sclavi, the series has seen rough times.Ironically, Vittima degli Eventi stumbles in the portrayal of Dylan. It's not a disaster, but it does feel weirdly off-character at times: his introduction as a smug, smarter-than-thou jerk is puzzling, and he appears way too gloomy throughout. His buffoonish sidekick Groucho - cut from the 2010 version for copyright issues (the character is a bizarre actor constantly impersonating Groucho Marx) - is manically on target.The Roman setting is questionable, the contrast between the more formal British atmosphere and the slouchy protagonist being an important element of the comics.