[EXPRESSO] Prophecy (2025) | Revenge Of The UberEats Boys

I’ve quite enjoyed Tetsuya Tsutsui mangas such as Reset, Noise, Duds Hunt… but i’ve never heard of “Prophecy”, that one sure eluded me.

So imagine my surprise when i saw this Italian live action film adaptation of his Prophecy manga announced months ago. Especially since they already made a Japanese live action film adaptation… back in 2015.

Sure the production studio, Brandon Box, notably also have been working on a Tiger Mask live action film (the anime was mad popular here back in the 80s)… but why this one specifically?

The plot involves a couple of young dudes trying to sell their stock market software, “Prophecy”, to a media mogul, but it fails spectacularly, forcing them to scrape by with odd jobs, until months later they find the mogul profitting over “Prophecy”. So they decide to moonlight as a modern, social media wise Robin Hood, the protagonist donning a mask made of newspaper and the alias “Paperboy”, becoming a viral sensation, things snowball, the police gets involved, yada yada.

It’s odd, because it’s not awful, acting is quite solid, i respect the attempt, the heart is in the right place, ….but it’s a tensionless thriller that comes off as weird step child of Mr. Robot and a crime caper comedy à-la Now You See Me (minus the magic), an action comedy thingie that touches upon modern problems like the rooted effect Internet has on our lives, social injustices like the UberEats style of “poverty jobs” forced upon people that were denied a better future… while also seeming stuck in the past on many pivotal plot elements like “hacking”, the characters are bidimensional cutouts, the script is kinda weak, full of unintentional anticlimaxes and just straight up forced plot developments.

Not bad, just kinda of a mess, but an okayish one.

Final Verdict: Americano

[EXPRESSO] Dampyr (2022) | Bonelli: The Masquerade

While i made clear i was very familiar with Dylan Dog’s source material in the review of Dylan Dog Dead Of Night, i can say quite the opposite for this new adaptation of an italian comic book series distribuited by Bonelli Editore, Dampyr, debutting at this year’s Lucca Comics & Games with renewed aspirations of a Bonelli MCU-thing.

So if you were looking for an in-depth review from a fan of the series, i’m not the guy this time, even if the situation it’s convenient for the sake of a more unbiased piece.

Set in the war torn Balkans during the early 1990s, Dampyr it’s about Harlan, a guy that manages to survive by posing as a dhampir (a half-human half-vampire hybrid in slavic folklore) for superstitious small villages, but it ends up dragged into the war as a unit of soldiers is attacked by vampires and Halan is brought there to help as a last resort. Little does he know he IS an actual dhampir, and the horrible dreams he constantly has are hints to his actual origins…

The vampire lore isn’t anything amazing but ain’t totally copy and pasted either, it has some inventions of its own (you can tell this was based on a comic book, regardless), acting by the international cast it’s fairly decent, the war-torn Balkans are a nicely bleak setting, production values aren’t shabby at all, the movie it’s definitely more than just “presentable”.

Overall, Dampyr it’s a fun, quite decent film, fairly entertaining but not much more, especially with some very cliched turns the story takes and the ouvert sequelbaiting. And the slightly confusing fact that two important characters basically look almost identical, like gothic vampire armored Alan Rickmans (or italian singer Renato Zero, for the “homies”) despite being played by different actors.