First, I have to say I never read the graphic novel, so this opinion is based solely on the movie...
This looked a little weird in the trailer I saw a while back, but it looked like it had the potential to be something different and so I decided to give it a shot. Well it was an interesting story, and I was right, it was weird.
There were some known actors in this film that gave decent performances like Michael Imperioli, Gina Gershon, and Eliza Dushku to name a few. I hadn't seen some of them in a while, so it was definitely a good sign when I saw them in the credits.
I found some of the effects to be OK (the character transformations), but some weren't; like fight scenes with obvious stand-ins. You could clearly see they weren't even close to the same actors which was very distracting in an important part of the film.
Another problem was character development. Most of the secondary characters, minus the two leads, weren't fleshed out very much at all. It made it difficult to care about them or what happens to them. Even the main baddie kind of comes out of nowhere which was very strange to me. Normally these characters are developed a little further so we can kind root for the guy guy (girl!) in the end; but that wasn't the case for me.
I was also a little bit annoyed about the movie taking place in such a small area. This normally isn't something I would notice, but they didn't do a very good job with the sets so it was pretty clear to me it was almost all the exact same set decorated differently. I don't have a problem with a low budget movie using the same set; but at least make me believe it isn't.
This was a little bit of a let down for me. I saw some recognizable faces and thought I might be in for a treat, but in the end the negatives outweigh the positives on this one. I think perhaps if the money was spent more on effects, and the writing (my guess is that they tried to stick to the novel too closely) was a little stronger on the character side, this could have been a decent movie. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case so I'll file this one under watch once to see something weird.
