The Spirit DVD Review

Published by Jeff Leins on April 13, 2009

The Spirit is an embarrassing display of high school theater performed in front of a green screen.  Maybe if the director, Frank Miller, wasn’t a comic book writer somehow turned director he might know what to do with world class actors and the borrowed visual style of Sin City.

Will Eisner’s classic comic has been given the same gritty makeover as Miller’s own graphic novel, only in this case the darkened matte doesn’t apply.  This PG-13 adaptation is like taking Nancy Drew and turning her into a sexy femme fatale.  It’s a comical mix and match of two entirely different visions in an almost unwatchable feature film.

The action is punctuated with cartoonish sound effects and childish gags, like a Looney Tunes episode shaded for the screen.  A comic book movie should be able to get away with exaggerated thresholds of pain, but the villain literally slams a toilet onto a stunned Spirit in an early slapstick fight, who then takes a flying sink to the face.  The Octopus picks himself up and says, “That’s enough.  Let’s get out of here.”  I couldn’t decide if he was encouraging the audience to leave, but I should have taken the cue.

The same goes for the performances where each chunk of dialogue has its own over-the-top delivery from aimless actors.  Men growl lines at each other (or no one in particular) and the women whisper every word in sultry seduction, but I guess you can’t expect much from characters so one-dimensional they resemble their original drawings.

“The Spirit” (Gabriel Macht) speaks in smooth, over-extended metaphors, especially about his anthropomorphic, apparently female city, which is perfect because he has a way with each and every woman he meets.  This includes “Sand Saref” (Eva Mendes), a young love who got away and prefers the company of shiny things.  His nemesis, Sam Jackson as “The Octopus,” is a caricature of himself, an impression of all the bad ass roles he’s done in the past rolled into one mascara-wearing maniac.  Let’s not forget the Octopus’ assistant, “Silken Floss,” played by Scarlett Johansson in what I can only assume was an opportunity for wardrobe to play sexy dress up with a curvy young actress.

Shuffle those characters around in a black fedora and line them up sloppily end-to-end and there’s your poor excuse for a plot. The Spirit is a masked, immortal vigilante skipping his way across the rooftops of his fair city obsessively chasing his enemy.  The Octopus is trying to procure mythical blood in order to turn his immortal body into a godlike being.  That’s about all that made sense.  The rest of the scenes were cringe-worthy sections of meaningless celluloid.

If The Spirit is Frank Miller spoofing his own Sin City then it’s a hilarious comedy creation.  If this is supposed to be a movie worth owning or even simply watching on DVD, it’s a complete waste of time and money.

1 out of 5.