Lionsgate/Odd Lot Entertainment
Gabriel Macht stars in "The Spirit," directed by Frank Miller.
Comic-book movies got good once filmmakers like Sam Raimi ("Spider-Man"), Christopher Nolan ("Batman Begins") and Bryan Singer ("X-Men") began to respect the source material, the original creators and the fans.
Yet here's a movie by a man considered to be one of the great modern comic-book creators, a movie motivated by a desire to pay homage to its revered source material -- and it stinks.
Lionsgate/Odd Lot Entertainment
Gabriel Macht stars in "The Spirit," directed by Frank Miller.
Adapted from the legendary comic strip, "The Spirit" is a classic action-adventure-romance told by genre-twister Frank Miller. It is the story of a former rookie ...
Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of stylized violence and action, some sexual content and brief nudity
Length: 103 minutes
Released: December 25, 2008 Nationwide
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Gabriel Macht
Director: Frank Miller
Writer: Frank Miller, Will Eisner
"Pardon me, but is there a point to all this?" The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) asks near the end of the new film that bears his name, as if reading the movie reviewer's mind.
Such lines of dialogue are a gift to the critic; a moment later, The Spirit -- perhaps aware his movie was scheduled for Christmas release -- offers another. "I sure as heck can get bored," he says, again picking up on the moviegoer's thoughts.
Inspired by a comic strip that was launched in 1940 as a Sunday newspaper supplement, "The Spirit" seems destined to hurtle its title crime-fighter back into movie limbo, with "Doc Savage," "Dick Tracy," "The Phantom" and "The Shadow," to name four other pulp-era heroes whose most recent live-action adaptations (in 1975, 1990, 1996 and 1994) were commercial and critical disappointments.
Comic books and movies have a lot in common; both these primarily visual art forms tell stories through sequential pictures, augmented by words. Despite this kinship, "The Spirit" conclusively demonstrates that a comic-book auteur may be no more a natural filmmaker than a basketball player is a ballerina.
"The Spirit" was scripted and directed by Frank Miller, the artist and writer whose 1986 Batman miniseries for DC Comics, "The Dark Knight Returns," helped kick off the current boom in relatively faithful superhero movies when it influenced Tim Burton's "Batman" (1989).
Miller is the credited co-director (with Robert Rodriguez) of 2005's "Sin City," an adaptation of another Miller comic-book series; he also created the graphic novels that inspired the following year's hit movie, "300."
"The Spirit" is as highly stylized as those two predecessors; it's a live-action film in which the actors exist within a striking, cartoonish, digitally enhanced world that resembles a comic-book illustration, leached of almost all color.
The Spirit was created by Will Eisner (1917-2005), who is regarded as one of the most important comics creators of all time (the comic-book industry's annual awards are called the Eisners). The character has been revived many times in the past seven decades, but he's little known to the mainstream audience.
Miller clearly wants to make the handsome Spirit a star, so he is faithful to Eisner, to a point; he retains the character's dark urban origin (The Spirit is a murdered cop, returned from the dead to fight crime) and hard-boiled detective appearance (fedora, broad-shouldered suit and bright red necktie, complemented with a comic-booky Lone Ranger-type mask).
Miller also uses several of the strip's original supporting cast members, including The Spirit's longtime crush, Sand Seraf (Eva Mendes); his archnemesis, the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson); and evil scientist Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson), described here as "the most beautiful woman ever." (Unsurprisingly, the comic strip's "darky" character, Ebony White, is absent from the film.)
Eisner was noted for his ripe drawings of voluptuous femmes fatales, so the casting of Mendes and Johansson is perhaps inevitable; these women are so curvy that even their upper lips cast shadows.
The square-jawed Macht provides a different type of eye candy for those uninterested in the female cast members; sadly, he offers little else. Macht may be a good actor, but you can't tell from "The Spirit." Here, he's a future trivia question -- this year's Klinton Spilsbury, the otherwise forgotten star of "The Legend of the Lone Ranger" (1981).
Most of the time, "The Spirit" plays as campy as an episode of the old "Batman" or even "Dudley Do-Right" TV programs, but without the wit. Combine the arch dialogue with the uninvolving, green-screen unreality of the production design and the stodgy momentum of the story, and the movie is only a few minutes old before the viewer smells disaster; that fear is confirmed when The Spirit and the Octopus engage in an early, lengthy slugfest that proves utterly inconsequential. Like the muck in which that battle takes place, "The Spirit" is a slog.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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