Review of The Spirit (2008) by Darik H — 08 Jul 2010

The Spirit is the worst comic book movie ever made. And that is saying something. It is an unholy abomination of a film, the lowest form of drek drudged up from the increasingly juvenile imagination of former comic superstar Frank Miller, who gives evidence with every new project he makes that he is losing his goddamn mind. A prime example of how computer animation and color correction can be abused by those who don't know how to use it, The Spirit tries to push the black-and-white world of Sin City one step further by taking a minimalist approach to the settings and adding a glob of the surreal to the story, but all it succeeds in doing is disconnecting the audience from the world the film is set in. As for the characters, every one is a hideous cartoon person, hollow and boring, and the actors who can bring charisma to their parts have little to do with it. For god's sakes, this movie makes Samuel L. Jackson unpleasant to watch, and that is a really hard thing to do! The blame, of course, falls entirely on rampaging egotist Frank Miller, who somehow thought he could direct a whole movie after "co-directing" Sin City with Robert Rodriguez. His inexperience and general ineptitude with the cinematic form are accountable for maybe a quarter of the film's failings; his degenerated storytelling style, however- eroded from years of writing and drawing the same stuff over and over again on the Sin City books with no reason to push himself out of his deepening creative rut- can be held to task for the rest of it. Taking a fairly straightforward, lighthearted comic character created by the late writer/artist Will Eisner (a true comic book genius and an innovator in the field) and supplanting the source material with his own absurdly over-the-top, obtusely satirical aesthetic, Miller creates an overbearing noir piece that can't decide whether it's making fun of itself or trying to be serious. This movie was badly written, badly designed, and badly executed; save Gabriel Macht's adventurous main character, who has some sparks of genuine levity and affability, the film has no redeeming qualities. It is a black hole of suck.

The plot is a patchwork of elements from several different genres: superhero movies, monster movies, Looney Tunes, and most excessively (and ineffectually) film noir. The movie starts with the mysterious crimefighter the Spirit emerging from his unexplained graveyard hide-out that we never see again to respond to a robbery (of whom, though, we never really know, as it's an underwater job- which I'd think would be more of a salvage operation than a robbery). The culprit, as it turns out, is Sand Saref, a bling-obsessed femme fatale who was the Spirit's girlfriend as a teen, until she got all bitter because her father died, and left town; Saref has a run-in with the Octopus, the city's biggest, weirdest drug kingpin/mad scientist, and only gets away with half of the loot during her escape. Turns out that it's exactly the half that the Octopus was after- it contains the blood of Heracles (yes, the Heracles- it's not just a clever nickname for a chemical), which will kill any normal person who drinks it, but it can also grant god-like powers when imbibed by someone who's taken Octopus's miraculous anti-death serum. Other than the Octopus, that only includes the Spirit, who, as we discover, was once a good cop named Denny Colt, a man who was gunned down in the line of duty and resurrected by the Octopus as sort of a test run for the serum; now he has nifty super-healing powers and is ridiculously hard to kill... and he also seems to ooze pheromones, because every single girl in the city goes all mushy whenever he's around (he even uses this ability to seduce a woman WHO'S ABOUT TO KILL HIM in, like, fifteen seconds, just by talking to her. Literally! I timed it!). Anyway, Saref and Octopus are about to make a trade when the Spirit shows up, gets shot something like a million times, stuffs a nuclear grenade between the Octopus's ribs (ouch), and takes cover under Heracles' golden fleece while the Octopus blows sky high. Oh, and there's a bunch of stupid rubbish about how Death (a beautiful woman, of course) wants Denny to come back to her because HE EVEN SEDUCED DEATH, but this plot point goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing. It's filler! Well, that's not true; actually I guess it services Miller's adolescent fantasies, just like ALL the relationships in this movie. The Spirit is the dashing, heroic guy that all the girls pant over and throw themselves at wantonly, but while he flirts mercilessly with all of them and probably gets around quite a bit, he's painted as being above all their feminine wiles and sensual temptations because he's given himself over to a higher purpose. There's always been something very Freudian about all of Miller's work (he named his first original character after a complex, for God's sake), but it's never been more obvious than here that Frank sees himself as the main character- or at least, this is who he wants to be.

The man playing the absurdly perfect hero is Gabriel Macht, a relatively unknown actor whom we've heard little from since this film bombed at the box office. This is kinda sad, though, 'cause Macht has a sort of everyman-ish charm that reminds me a little of a young Bruce Campbell or a less annoying Josh Lucas. In fact, Macht's performance is probably the best in the film, undercut primarily by two things: a lame voice-over narration that insists on fetishizing the city he lives in (Central City, allegedly), referring to it continually as a woman (must it always be sexual, Frank?), and the fact that he's seriously hampered by bad dialogue, poor characterization, and inadequate screentime (damn- I guess that's actually four things). Samuel L. Jackson's Octopus, on the other hand, we spend entirely TOO much screentime with. His unexplained costume choices (he wears a different one in each scene), hazy motivations, and really annoying, crappy jokes (I don't know why Miller thought that running gag about eggs was funny, but around the fifth repetition of it I started getting pissed off) make him by far the least interesting villain I've ever come across, and without a strong villain, there's just no dramatic tension in the movie. The problem is exacerbated by his bald cloned army of thugs, all played by Louis Lombardi as cheerful morons with no sense of self-preservation; they aren't funny, and since they're supposed to be, their very presence on screen kills the movie's momentum. Dan Lauria (the dad from The Wonder Years) is decent at least as the bellowing Commissioner Dolan, but he seems more nagging than commanding when he gives orders or dresses down the Spirit. Then, there are the girls. This movie is overloaded with hot actresses, starting most auspiciously with Eva Mendes as Sand Saref, who has never been more blatantly objectified than she is in this movie (the dresses she wears are bordering on obscene, and she even does a rear nude scene). Sarah Paulson plays Dr. Ellen Dolan, the good girl who used to date Denny and now dotes on the Spirit in spite of his wandering eye (and mouth); being the good girl, Ellen gets dumped on more than anyone else, and the fact that she sticks with Denny even when he treats her like dirt makes her look needy and lacking in self-esteem. Scarlett Johansson plays the Octopus's second-in-command Silken Floss, and she has never been more wasted in her career: the character is monotone and disinterested, not compelling in any way, and she doesn't even get objectified well- her costumes are fugly, and they insist on putting ghastly granny glasses on her. Jaime King plays Lorelei, a.k.a. Death, who is just a breathy-voiced apparition that taunts the Spirit and does nothing else. And Paz Vega shows up for ONE SCENE as Plaster of Paris, a freaky belly-dancing assassin (the one the Spirit talks out of killing him with just three sentences [in untranslated French, of course]) who contributes nothing to the film as well. This is just gratuitous! Miller intentionally flooded his film with hot chicks because, well, I think the guy's turned into a horndog in his old age. Not that I'd normally complain about him getting Eva Mendes into a wetsuit, but there's only so much good will that can be engendered by parading attractive women in front of the camera- especially since the dialogue is loaded with downright lewd double entendres and a general lack of respect for these women. I know, I know- Hollywood, objectifying women? It's unprecedented, but I think it's true; this movie is like an hour-and-a-half long FHM photoshoot.

The script for this is just abysmal. Frank lifts material wholesale from a LOT of his old work (Daredevil, Sin City, The Dark Knight Returns, and even The Dark Knight Strikes Again- ugh) to pad the thing out, and the stuff that isn't ripped off from anything is just plain damn stupid: bizarre cloning mistakes, Nazi-themed dental torture sessions, throwing Greek mythology into a movie that already features science-fiction elements, etc. And hearing the dialogue is like getting a root canal for your brain. If you're mind isn't numbed by lines like "I'm gonna kill you all kinds of dead," "Well I'll be learnin' ya'! I'll be learnin' ya' real soon," and, my personal favorite, "LET'S DIE!", then the broken-record repetition will finish the job (how many times do they have to repeat, "That's just plain damn weird"?). The costumes are so stupid they make me want to scream- from the thugs' T-shirts that are all inexplicably plastered with random words that end in "os" ("Pathos", "Huevos", "Adios"... WHY?!?), to the horrifyingly misogynistic costumes all the girls wear (except for doormat Ellen Dolan and boring Silken Floss, whose '50s-inspired get-ups actually succeed in making her look UNattractive), and in particular the Octopus's plethora of "WTF?"-inspiring costumes, from Mexican cowboy to Russian pimp and even Nazi General, Nazis being a strange fixation of Frank's (don't ask). The cinematography and lighting are all mainly digital, so they're nice and flat; with all the color drained out of it- but not ENOUGH for it to be truly black-and-white- the film just looks lifeless and dull (color palettes are important, Frank- you should know that!). The C.G. is all-pervasive and neither believable nor appealingly stylish, which is like knee-capping the movie from the first minute because it robs the audience of suspension of disbelief even BEFORE the Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny throwdown between the Octopus and the Spirit, which comes only ten minutes into the movie and is goofy and absurd and played for laughs. A showdown between the hero and the MAIN VILLAIN should NEVER be played for laughs- but if it is, it should at least be funny. Smashing a toilet over your hero's head and slamming a giant wrench into his crotch isn't funny. It's stupid.

I don't know at what point in his career Frank Miller went fucking nuts, but ever since the new millenium began his work has become an ever-more-grotesque parody of itself. The Dark Knight Strikes Back is an ugly, pointless book that was a middle finger to all the fans who wanted a Dark Knight Returns sequel; All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder was an inane comic that featured a bat-shit (no pun intended) crazy Batman who said things like "What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Batman" to frightened ten-year-olds; and the Spirit is a butchery of its source material- which was good-humored and light-hearted- turning it into a faux-gritty noir imitation, a Sin City clone without the style. It kinda feels like the Dick Tracy of the 2000s, an anticipated film with a great cast that tries to ape the style of a previously successful film (in Tracy's case, the '89 Batman), but nevertheless crashed and burned because it's got no focus and no soul. So why, you may ask, did I give it a whole star, and not just a half? Well, I gotta say it's primarily because of Gabriel Macht, whose character was criminally mistreated by Miller and then shuffled into the background during the marketting campaign, yet is easily the best thing about the movie- entirely thanks to the actor. I really do think Macht has some talent- or at least a tremendous amount of charisma that I think would work well in the kinds of movies Hollywood makes- and it's a shame that his first shot at a starring role had to be in Frank Miller's newest masturbatory nightmare. I hope the guy lands a real movie someday...