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

Approximately nine months ago, my wife brought up an interesting proposal: “Why Don’t We Go to San Diego for Comic Con?” This was without virtually any prompting on my part; I had no horse in the race, so to speak. I’m not that big of a comic book fan, but we were looking for something to do. So why not go, right? And if you’re going to go, go in style; I booked a room at the newly opened Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego, which seemed like a pretty cool status symbol. Aside from an experience at the franchise’s New York restaurant years ago, I did forget that the Hard Rock plays music. All the time. But, compared to other places, it was rock music. The merchandise shop played Black Flag in there, so booyah bitches!

Anyway, the film lineup was pretty good, and I’ll be sharing those here after the jump of the films I managed to sit in on. I’m sure the webs have the footage somewhere, so feel free to search on your own time. On with the opinions!

The Day The Earth Stood Still: Fox was the first to the show, and Keanu Reeves (The Matrix), Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind) and Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) came out to pimp the remake of the 1951 classic to be released in December. It was discussed, sometimes at great length, with a couple of shots from the film, and an extended trailer. No, we didn’t get to see Gort, but WETA is doing the work on him now, and things are still very close to the vest. Aside from Connelly being VERY much out of place, barely talking, I’d come in fresh to this, and personally am still wondering why it’s being remade to begin with.

Max Payne: Mark Wahlberg (The Departed), Mila Kunis (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Chris Bridges (a.k.a., the artist formerly known as Ludacris) and John Moore (The Omen) discuss the film which is coming out in October. Wahlberg clearly had fun and played up to the crowd, and everyone talked about how fun it was to do it, meaning how cool it was to fire weapons all day. Moore talked about their own little version of “bullet time” that was employed for the film. Aside from an extended trailer cut to a live version of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” this was a bit of a yawner.

Wolverine: Ole Wolverine himself Hugh Jackman came onstage as an unannounced surprise to throngs of delirious hysterics. After shaking the hand of Len Wein, the creator of the comic book icon, Jackman was happy to finally actually be onstage, as he’d apparently missed the X-Men presentations that occurred in previous Cons.  I’m going to rattle off the cast here; Ryan Reynolds (The Nines) as Deadpool, Liev Schreiber (The Sum of All Fears) as Sabretooth, Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights as Gambit, to name a few who appear in the trailer. And it’s loaded with action too, which doesn’t hurt. Definitely the one people will be looking forward to in ‘09, unless the GI Joe teaser comes strong.

As a side note; what was particularly interesting about the Fox presentation was that a lot, and I mean A LOT of people got in early so they could be ready for Summit Pictures’ presentation of Twilight. Everyone around my wife and I was there in their “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob” shirts, whatever that means, but unfortunately I was called away for other events. I’m told though that the Twilight footage was essentially an extended version of the second trailer with the climatic ballet room sequence, and everyone ate it up. As they should I suppose. But I thought it was a little funny that the Fox gang seemed to trot out their products to hordes of Twilight fans, without knowing what they were getting into. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Watchmen: Try as I might to stay away from the masses, I snuck in for a second, where Zack Snyder (300) and the cast were discussing the film. Aside from an extended trailer, more shots of the heroes were shown which really illustrated Snyder’s vision and faithfulness to the source material, and since this is being released in March, expect some more mad money on a Snyder production.

The Spirit: Frank Miller (Sin City) might be an influential comic book figure, but he needs to lay off the liquor or something. At times he seemed to ramble, and cast members Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) and Jaime King (Blow) seemed to notice. Still though, the footage that was shown of the film looks good, done visually much in the same way that Sin City was. While there’s humor, there are also a couple of required action sequences that look impressive as well. A concern I have a little with this film is that it might not seem to possess the spark of similar comic book films that possess a similar visual style, but I hope I’m proved wrong in this because at least from what I saw, The Spirit could potentially be a good film.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno: Showed up a little late to the game on this one, as I was drinking with some of the cast of ABC Family’s Samurai Girl, which appears to be a Buffy-ish show, except without some of the wit and wisdom. But I will say this about Kevin Smith, he’s got some fans in the biz, for sure, and now in this film, he’s got a couple members of the Judd Apatow stock company in Seth Rogen (Knocked Up) and Justin Long (Accepted) together in this film that looks pretty funny. Bonus points for Long’s, er, “moment” with Brandon Routh. Yes, that Brandon Routh, from Superman Returns. Aside from listening to Rogen’s kind of funny Ian McKellen joke and Jason Mewes looking very impressive all cleaned up from addiction, Zack and Miri comes out in October hopefully, and should be worth the hubbub, even if they might have to change the title.

Terminator Salvation: You know, Christian Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard(?) aside, McG seems to carry himself as a bit of a pompous arse. Why exactly would we want to see a film about a battle with first-generation terminator robots? Why would Arnold Schwarzenegger even consider appearing in this? Ugh. To be fair, McG (Charlie’s Angels) likes paying homage to the previous three films, even including attendees who dressed like Robert Patrick and Linda Hamilton from T2 on stage with him, along with an Asian kid whose Arnold accent seemed to venture into Walken-esque territory. He showed an extended teaser of sorts, without any CG shots in it, and the results? Meh. I counted nods to The Road Warrior and The Great Escape in there, along with something that looked visually a little like Charlie’s Angels, right now to the hot chick almost taking her top off. I’ve got to say I liked the teaser in front of Dark Knight more than I did this stuff, and unlike some of the buzz so far, am concerned that this “reboot” might nuke the franchise from orbit.

Pineapple Express: Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to sneak into the preview screenings that apparently were going on in town, and the footage that Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin), Rogen and gang brought seemed a little to be desired. It seemed like they basically brought stuff from the website or something. One of the scenes came from the Superbad DVD. But come on, you know what this film is going to be about, you’re either going to go see it or you’re not. Oh, and Green Hornet is still on the track of getting made, so yay to that.

Well, that’s the short story on the film side. A quick note on things to come, expect a review of Tropic Thunder in the very near future, along with TV Verdict thoughts from the Heroes and Lost panels, including some teasing of Heroes 3^rd season, as the opener was aired in its entirely exclusively for the Comic Con folks. Until next time, get the funk out your minds and into your hearts people!