The Spirit

Just about everything with “The Spirit” is wrong. It’s a screaming, flaming train wreck. If you know anything about the titular comic book character, forget it! This is comic book author Frank Miller’s directorial debut and interpretation of the Will Eisner creation, and it sucks the big one.

Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht) was one of Central City’s finest cops until he was killed on duty. Somehow, he rose from the dead and found himself with extraordinary regenerative abilities. Major injuries are now minor inconveniences to him. Now he roams the streets as The Spirit, beating up criminals and searching for a way to take down his arch-nemesis, the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) When our story begins, The Octopus is trying to get his hands on the blood of Heracles (yes, the mythical Greek Hero), which will allow him to become a god. Complicating things is the return of the Spirit’s old flame, Sand Serif (Eva Mendes) and the fact that our hero falls in love with every woman he meets.

“The Spirit” is the story of a director who had no idea how to make a proper film. The performances are all over the place, but they all have one thing in common: they’re all agonizingly bad. Samuel L. Jackson is embarrassing as The Octopus, a crazed cartoon character who likes to play dress up (We get to see him in a variety of hats and coats, as a Japanese sensei and as a Nazi commander) and screams half of his lines. At the other end of the spectrum is Gabriel Macht, so reserved he comes off as a human plank of wood. He has zero chemistry with the slew or gorgeous women who co-star in the film. We’re talking Sarah Paulson as the wife of his now deceased alter-ego, Scarlett Johansson as The Octopus’ aide Silken Floss, Paz Vega as Plaster of Paris, a sword-wielding belly dancer/assassin/excuse to have a woman dance around in a tiny outfit and the aforementioned Eva Mendes.

Then there’s the dialogue. The Octopus has this weird recurring joke about eggs. How he loves them but hates the brown ones, how he doesn’t like having “egg on his face” and how he’ll beat the Spirit like people “beat their eggs”. When characters aren’t repeating themselves, they’re delivering dialogue that isn’t dialogue, it’s exposition. This movie constantly features characters talking to each other about what the plot is about. The Octopus and the Spirit fight, while they talk about their similar powers, Silken Floss and The Octopus, discuss at length how his operations work while they work in a lab, The Spirit and Ellen Dolan (Paulson) go on and on about what their tenuous relationship is like. It sounds exactly like a comic book narration being read out loud by a bunch of actors in costumes instead of natural exchanges of dialogue between people who have known each other for years.

The one thing you would think that movie would have going for it is the style, but I’ll even challenge you on that. The movie uses lights, shadows, and hues very well, with the film being primarily black-and-white with color used to accentuate identifying characteristics, like the Spirit’s tie. There are many scenes of extreme contrast in the color palette to accentuate some action, an object or a crucial element in the scene. If you watch the trailer, you’ll think to yourself that it looks pretty cool, and it does. The problem is that we’ve seen this before, in “Sin City”, (also based Miller's works) This film is neither in continuity nor in the same genre as that one so it feels more like a director recycling his own material than actually bringing something exciting to the table.

Speaking of the director’s previous works, you can recognize Frank Miller’s style at work, to a fault. Prepare yourself for pointless references to Elektra (from Marvel) and Robin (from the Batman comics) because Miller wrote the characters for a while. There are shots that are very reminiscent of “Sin City” (take a close look at the scene where the Spirit crawls out of the water and tell me that Dinosaur doesn’t look familiar) and once again, we’ve got a heavy theme of Ancient Greek history and Mythology from “300”. Additionally, you will notice that every single female character is a super hot example of human perfection that falls head over heels for either the Spirit, or is under the Octopus’ thumb. There are no strong women to be found in this story. This isn’t the author parodying himself, as the questionable humor falls flat on its face every single time.

When so many things go this wrong, it’s the director’s fault. I’ve liked some of the man’s work before (such as “The Dark Knight Returns”, “300” and the “Sin City” series, which are all excellent) but Frank Miller doesn’t know anything about film. He has no idea how to get actors to give convincing performances, how to write a script that doesn’t consist of long monologs and sequences of exposition. He needed someone to slap him upside the head and choose actors that were actually suited for the characters in the story like I need a spell check to make sure my review are coherent. The best part of this film are the end credits because they follow a logical order, show storyboard sketches of the most exciting scenes in the movie (also by Miller) and are actually original in appearance. I had seen this film in the theater and for reasons beyond my understanding actually ended up picking up the Blu-ray. I hoped that with lowered expectations, it could be enjoyable. It’s not humanly possible to lower your expectations enough to find “The Spirit” good. (On Blu-ray, December 2013)