Review of “The Spirit”
When you have a hit film in Hollywood, the world is your oyster. Studio executives, desperate to secure your services, hoping for the taint of your success to rub off on them, bend over backwards to lure you to sign with their studios and make them rich. Nothing you want is too much. Solid gold toilets. Hot and cold running hookers. And in the case of Frank Miller who in 2007 had not one but two hit films (as writer-director of Sin City and as writer of 300) you might ask for and receive carte blanche to produce any film, at any budget.
That film is The Spirit, and can I say to Hollywood… Big Mistake. It is this kind of reckless and unchecked spending of other people’s money that has the world in the financial pickle it now finds itself.
An homage of sorts to the film serials of the 1940s, The Spirit himself (Gabriel Macht) is a masked crime fighter working alongside the police in Central City. A former police officer who was killed on the job, he was brought back to life as part of a failed experiment in immortality by the evil genius Octopus (Samuel L Jackson). Both Octopus, his hench-woman Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) and femme fatale Sand Serif (Eva Mendes) are tearing up Central City looking for a mythic treasure, and it is The Spirit’s job to stop them.
The Spirit hails from a graphic novel by Will Eisner, and the problem with this film is that Miller puts so much effort into remaining true to two dimensional characters he forgets that they are just that. He might have been going for parody, but it falls far short.
Perhaps it is this summer heat getting on my nerves, but I thought The Spirit was bad. Dick Tracey bad.
What it does have going for it is a great cast doing their best, and Frank Miller’s eye for constructing a frame. His colours are lurid and the costuming is lush, but that’s as nice as I can be. The dialogue is inane, and while I am sure it is supposed to be tongue in cheek, it lacks invention and humour. In aiming for depth it feels almost childish – in one scene the bad guy wears a Nazi uniform and gives his evil expositional speech in front of a poster of Hitler. I would expect that kind of lame visual referencing from a high school film project, and even then they’d be marked down for being too obvious.
CK
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