I have a firm belief (that many will probably challenge) when it comes to filmmaking. I believe that a good story with good acting and good dialogue will always triumph over shaky visuals. The Mist’s visuals were average, if not bad, but it still managed to win over most critics. Another obscure monster movie, Eight Legged Freaks, had CGI spiders that stuck out like sore thumbs against the screen, yet the witty story and smart dialogue made it one of my favorites. Alas, it’s not a two-way street. Strong visuals cannot overcome a bad story, and though it can make a movie entertaining (Transformers), visuals alone can never make it truly good.
But I’ll be damned if The Spirit doesn’t try.
Frank Miller’s latest effort to filiminize lesser-known comic icons* achieves a nearly impossible feat of being beautiful to look at it, while simultaneously painful to watch.
The Spirit is another monotone, film-noir type story in the same vein of 2005’s Sin City, with most of the colors washed out with the exception of the ones we’re focused to symbolize moods and tones. Many people dub it the Sin City effect but I prefer the Pleasantville effect because I liked that movie and everyone seems to have forgotten about it.
Anyway, this comic-book cinematography does wonders as eye candy. The grey of the city is strangely beautiful, the slight sepia in certain parts truly thrusts you into the gritty underground world in an amazingly genuine fashion. The Spirit walks across nothing but a red background. He dances underwater with beautiful women with blazing blue eyes. His cute little red tie glows eerily and proudly as he scrambles across rooftops. Any way you slice it, The Spirit truly is, from a cinematography standpoint, a work of art that begs to be watched while under the influence of foreign substances.
But there’s a big problem with everything else in the movie: everything else sucks.
Frank Miller, who penned the screenplay, should be banned from the WGA and not permitted to write scripts ever again. From the opening, the dialogue is blatantly laughable. The story is one of the most unimaginative I’ve ever come across. His motivation for being a super hero is never truly defined, and Samuel L. Jackson’s villain, the “Octopus” (who makes sure to tell us he has eight of everything…except probably points on his IQ score) seems more like a parody rather than anyone we should take seriously. That’s contradictory of Miller, for the film takes itself so seriously that when you throw in a villain like Jackson’s it kind of makes you wonder what exactly they were aiming for.
Gabriel Macht does a decent job of portraying the masked vigilante, but he’s an unfortunate victim of circumstance. The characters around him overact so much and his dialogue is so corny and clichéd that it completely takes you out of the experience the amazing visuals try so hard to push you into.
There’s one scene in particular I watched with my roommate that I think epitomizes everything you need to know about The Spirit:
The Spirit is tied to a chair in some Nazi interrogation room, while Jackson explains to him dubious plans involving the DNA of Hitler and drinking the blood of Hercules all while melting a cat. Seconds later, a beautiful woman who is supposed to kill the Spirit sets him free, then tries to kill him anyway after they escape.
If you’re wondering, I didn’t make anything above up. And you’ll probably say the same thing when you see it that we both did: “What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On?”
The Spirit tries so hard to be a stylistic Batman with unique ideas that it ends up falling off the edge of the Earth and into a vat of ludicrous plot turns and a muddled story that feels more like it came from the mind of a 3rd grader entering a “Make Your Own Superhero” contest rather than from a respected figure like Frank Miller. It’s a shame that such fabulous visuals are wasted on what in the end is 2 hours of Frank Miller trying to imitate The Dark Knight while at the same time not imitating The Dark Knight. There’s potential here, there really is, but it seems that any chance that The Spirit had of making a good movie was dashed the second Frank Miller sat down to write it.
Score: 2/10
*lesser known to people who don't read comic books or know comic book history
