Review: The Spirit

The Spirit

OPENING: 12/25/2008

STUDIO: Lionsgate

TRAILER: Trailer

ACCOMPLICES: Official Site

The Charge
I’m gonna kill you all kinds of dead.

Opening Statement
Are you a lifelong fan of Will Eisner’s groundbreaking comic strip upon which The Spirit is based? Then please, for your own peace of mind, stay away from this movie.

Facts of the Case
Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht, Behind Enemey Lines) is in love. Not with a woman, though he has certainly loved more than his share. No, Denny Colt is in love with a city. Central City, to be specific. When the city goes to sleep, Denny dons a mask, a suit, and a red tie. This wardrobe change marks Denny’s transformation into The Spirit, the two-fisted crime-fighter who battles to preserve his true love’s honor. Denny is a square-jawed, straight-shooting kind of guy. He stays on the right side of the law at all times, working with the police as much as possible. Though he and Commissioner Dolan (Dan Lauria, The Wonder Years) will occasionally get into a squabble, there’s no question about who the good guys and bad guys are in this town. Oh, and believe me, the good guys are needed, because there are some very bad guys. The baddest of them all is The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson, Soul Men), a villain of the most fiendish sort. He’s currently cooking up a plan to become an immortal god. Not on The Spirit’s watch, kids. It’s time to fight some crime.

The Evidence
No serious Will Eisner fan will be pleased with The Spirit, because this is most assuredly a desecration of the character and his world in every single way. It’s hard to fathom why Eisner’s cheerfully exuberant comic was turned over to comic book writer/artist turned movie director Frank Miller. Though I like some of Miller’s early work, his gritty, angry, testosterone-driven style seems a very poor fit for this character. Believe me, this is most assuredly a Frank Miller movie in every single way, not a Will Eisner film. Oh sure, you’ll recognize elements from the comics. But if you’re looking for a respectable modern update of Eisner’s comic (one that removes the non-PC elements while also staying true to it’s source material), you should check out the 12 Spirit stories Darwyn Cooke wrote for DC Comics not too long ago.

Many comic book fans have grown cold towards Miller’s writing in the past decade or so. The phrase, “He’s become a parody of himself,” is heard quite a lot, and I imagine this film will inspire similar comments. This isn’t the Miller who gave us Sin City and “The Dark Knight Returns.” This is the Miller who gave us the mindlessly bloodthirsty 300 and is currently writing “All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder.” The Spirit is a crazed train wreck of a movie, but sometimes an rather entertaining one. It’s a silly movie, and Miller knows it’s a silly movie. It’s absurd to think anyone involved with this film was taking The Spirit seriously in any way. The film’s preposterous plot and ridiculous sense of logic provided a certain element of nostalgia for me.

Just the other day, I was listening to an old radio episode of “The Shadow,” starring Orson Welles. The episode involved a man who lived on an island. This man attempted to convince all of the natives that he was a god. He did this by doing a nightly show in which he rose up out of a volcano, and by creating a powerful magnetic device that could pull planes out of the sky. The Spirit has a similar sense of pulpy glee, a tribute to an era in which comic books (along with some radio adventures, pulp magazines, etc.) were free of restraints like logic, common sense, and realism. They were free to be whatever they darn well wanted to be, and it’s in this way that Miller actually does manage to pay tribute to Will Eisner. “The Spirit” was a comic that did it’s own thing, breaking convention and comic book rules with regularity. Likewise, Miller’s movie breaks all kinds of modern cinematic rules. While Eisner’s work is vastly superior to Miller’s, it’s still kind of fun to see a film that does it’s own thing.

The actors are all in tune with what Miller is up to here. Gabriel Macht plays the the title role with a deadpan seriousness that I found rather amusing, though he is blasted off the screen (literally and figuratively) by Samuel L. Jackson, who gives the most over-the-top performance of his career… a career that has been defined by over-the-top performances. Over the course of the film, Jackson plays a cowboy, a gangster, a samurai warrior, and a Nazi, for no better reason than it seems like a way to shake things up. The movie is entertainingly desperate to keep throwing new stuff at the audience. Jackson fuses a man’s head to a tiny foot, and then watches it hop around. “That is really strange,” he observes. In another moment, he instructs a henchman to commit seppuku. “Am I doing it right?” the henchman asks curiously. A variety of talented actresses generously set aside their talent, in order to perform a variety of strange acts for Miller’s wacky circus.

Closing Statement
I can’t really recommend The Spirit, because it’s a great big mess — very uneven, ultimately unsatisfying, and a disgrace to the source material. Even so, I kind of had fun watching, quietly pleased by the sheer outlandish audacity of things. This like nothing you’ve ever seen, and I sincerely doubt you will ever see such a display again.

The Verdict
6/10

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