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Youth Without Youth
But first he has to recover from the blow. Under the care of
Professor Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz), our hero first is in a coma,
but soon is able to hear and has replaced his grey hair with brown
and is growing a new set of teeth. Within six weeks, he's literally
a new man. This being 1938, the Nazis become interested. So they
send a secret agent(Alexandra Pirici), to find out what the deal is,
for her boss, the evil Dr. Josef Rudolf (André M. Hennicke) wants to
use whatever it is turned Dominic into an übermensch, to create a
Nazi master race. But this is an R-rated film for grownups, and
instead of donning a costume and fighting crime, he flees to
Switzerland, better to hone his superhuman powers and abilities
without the Nazis screwing things up.
The film is actually pretty good, not great, but good. This is after
all, Francis Ford Friggin' Coppola here, making his first film under
his name on it since before the turn of the century. This is the guy
who made some of the greatest films of all time. Which makes this
thing so disappointing. After a wait of seven years [he was supposed
to have co-directed 2000's “Supernova”] I guess we were waiting for
something that would blow us away. It did not. This doesn't mean
that had someone else had put their name on it, it would suck, not
by any means, as was said before, this is an excellent episode of
“Heroes” or some such comic book extravaganza. It's also reminiscent
of Woody Allen's “Zelig” or Jurgen Olczyk's “Perfume” although, it's
better than the latter by far. As comic book movies go, this is one
of the better ones. Go to Index Archives of past reviews
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After seeing this film, I started to think about a TV show called
“Heroes.” It seems to me that the notorious “X-men” rip-off on and
that this was just another episode. Granted, it was much better made
than the series, after all, it was made by the guy who made some of
the best films ever made. But that's magic realism for you.