I am disappointed in this movie.
This was sensibly worse than the first one in acting, directing and writing. They stayed too faithful to the original dialogues, that in a comicbook from the mid sixties make sense, in a movie from 2022 does not. In every dialogue there was too much exposition, especially the ones between Altea and Ginko (a demerit note to Monica Bellucci, which tried to give Altea an exotic accent from an unknown part of Europe, and failed miserably. And of course, she can't act.), which were the new couple of the movie. Unfortunately they have very little chemistry on screen, but maybe it wouldn't be so terrible if it weren't for the soap-opera dialogues they exchanged.
As for the new Diabolik, role given to Giacomo Giannotti, I found he looked like a nice, polished, young Diabolik in looks, but that was it. He didn't really have that much of a personality, as his partner Eva Kant (who has, again, terrible dialogues and are very poorly executed too). I felt like the directors wanted to give this Diabolik a more sensual feeling than the first one, which looked and sounded like a borderline psycho. And yet somehow they made it worse, because the final product is a boring episode of a thriller tv show that you would have just skipped to see the next one.
So you sit in a movie theater after paying your ticket, unable to skip the parts where Ginko explains his plan in details for like 5 minutes to the stupid policeman in his office, suffering everytime Altea speaks, cringing at the sexist vibes this movie give.
Yes, this movie is sexist, I'm not sure the Manetti Brothers see it themselves, but this is a major problem. Unfortunately the comicbooks of Diabolik, especially the first ones, are too, but as a director and a screenwriter you have the power to change some stuff when you film a movie... Sure, they tried to mask the sexism with a couple of scenes (I'm referring to the female cops that walk into a bar to ask for a phone and one of them get harassed by a random guy who gets beaten up by said girl, but then again this scene comes after a couple of painful lines in which a showman says that the women will enoy the jewels and the man will enjoy the legs of the models wearing the jewels... and honestly I'm not sure these lines are taken from the comicbook!), but I'd say they didn't do it very well. Altea is useless and you can tell she is in this movie only because she needed to be in the next one, so they needed to introduce her character in someway; she literally does nothing, she only exist to be Ginko's partner (now, you can argue that it's the same in comics, but there are some episodes in which Altea DOES STUFF). Eva exists to compliment her man, she is sexy, dangerous and smart because she need to be, yet she will always recognize her man is superior to her. The policegirl that has a small yet "important" part in the end could have been avoided. Diabolik refuses to kill her in a sort of misplaced piety, probably because she is an innocent woman. Unfortunately we kinda miss the step Diabolik took from being a ruthless criminal in the first movie to become a gentleman who doesn't kill women in this one. And it's ridiculous and yes, sexist. You can't spare a girl just because it's a girl. That's sexist, I'm sorry.
I'm not sure if the reason she was spared is that she'll make another appearance in the next movie, but anyway it didn't feel right.
Hoping to see improvement in the next one, but I think it'll get worse and worse.