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Review: The Spirit Is Disspiriting
Maybe you have to be a fan of The Spirit as a comic strip to enjoy it as a movie. Which would seem to limits its appeal severely, given that it was a cult item in printed form - and essentially ended in the early 1950s.
To me, the Will Eisner series was neither fish nor fowl - not exciting enough to compare to, say, Batman comics. But neither was it funny enough to hold a candle to Mad magazine - Mad classic, that is, back in the day - which Eisner's work helped inspire.
Still, based on Frank Miller's work with Robert Rodriguez on Sin City and the look of the Spirit trailer, this film seemed to promise something special. Unfortunately, the opposite is true.
The action is listlessly cartoony, the humor even limper. The comparison here isn't to Sin City - it's to the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie (the one that serves as a permanent stain on Robert De Niro's filmography). This movie does indeed have a dated 1950s' Mad sensibility, just not its wit. If someone had used the word "fershlugginer," it would have been complete.
Gabriel Macht plays the Spirit (formerly Denny Colt), a polite skirt-chasing masked crimefighter, whose archenemy is the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). Not Dr. Octopus from Spider-man, mind you - he doesn't have eight arms. Instead, he's got a make-up fetish like early 70s David Bowie - the only part of his look that doesn't change from scene to scene are the eight squiggles of mascara that are drawn under his peepers (four under each eye).
Octopus is after a historical artifact: the vase that holds Heracles' blood, which will confer true immortality and super-power on him. Except that both he and the Spirit are already immortal because Octo has injected them with some of that same juice they seem to be shooting each other up with on Heroes.
I could go on, into the Spirit's backstory, his romance with the hard-boiled, soft-hearted doctor (Sarah Paulson) who routinely patches him up, or the various bizarre cloning experiments Octo and his brainy sidekick, Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson), are running.
But what's the point? It would just make it sound way more interesting than it is. If you're expecting the dark, wicked humor and dazzlingly gruesome violence of Sin City, you'll be sorely disappointed.
On the other hand, if you're in the mood for a slavishly witless live reproduction of Eisner's comic - complete with monochromatic images punctuated with slashes of red - this movie is for you.
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WRONG! This is one of the best films this year! It's startlingly beautiful, hilarious and even touching. Great story-telling. Terrific acting. And, my God, Samuel L. Jackson as the Octopus? Perfection itself! The packed audience I just saw it with loved it too. So...phooey on yoouey!
To each their own; I'd rather not get into a flame war over this one. But I thought it was insanely bad.
To say that Brad Bird would have done a better job than Frank Miller is an understatment.
Frank, in his day, was a great artist and solid story teller. This film proves that those days are long gone.
In addition to a moratorium on comic book movies for at least a year, I'd like to have Frank Miller's artistic license revoked. His fanboy pastiches of material that was considered lowbrow in its heyday are wearing on me.
From preview 1, it was my impression that Miller's film would be a projection of Eisner's characters into Miller's graphics style. I'm no Eisner expert, but I do own two of his books, a Spirit collection and a graphic novel "Into the Storm" which is well-drawn and well-written. Your mid-blog characterization of Eisner's Spirit work seems correct, but, from what I've seen (and I won't see the movie), I doubt that this movie is any sort of reproduction, let alone slavish.
He means "slavish" in the same sense the Society for Creative Anachronism uses the term "period Nazi": more concerned with piddling little details of the source material than the overall project. It happens a lot with stuff adapted from properties with existing fanbases.
If that's the case, it's a failure on that level, too. Miller made some totally unneccessary changes in the character and his origin, and ruined the look of the comic, too. I can't find the link offhand, but Brad Bird (director of the Incredibles and Iron Giant) tried to get a version done in the 80s, but Eisner didn't want it done as a cartoon. A shame, really.
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