Smells Like Weak Spirit

[December 24th, 2008]

At the climax of Frank Miller’s last behind-the-camera effort—adapting his own Sin City comic series with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino —Bruce Willis’ hardened cop rewarded a villain for years of child molestation by ripping the baddie’s balls off and chucking them in the pervert’s face. Pleasant stuff, spawned by the legendary comic artist’s deranged mind and brought to the screen in black-and-white (with generous smatterings of red and yellow) in a technically marvelous green-screen cinematic canvas. Sin City, for good or ill, was a comic book brought truly to life, its grisly scenes of violence and depravity resembling the comics frame by frame. Whatever its faults, the movie had balls.

Sadly, in bringing Will Eisner’s iconic 1940s comic series The Spirit to the screen, Miller has effectively castrated his sense of hard-boiled lunacy in favor of a Loony Tunes romp chock full of half-baked ideas. It’s hard not to think that this is what Sin City would look like had some vengeful specter of nonsense wreaked havoc on the film’s consistencies during post-production.

It’s not a total ripoff of the fledgling director’s previous effort. Instead of drenching the screen completely in black and white, The Spirit is sepia toned and frequently relies on silhouettes and shadows to tell the tale of Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht), a gunned-down Dudley Dipshit cop who rises from his grave to protect the city as a masked avenger. The Spirit is able to rapidly absorb bullets and leap from rooftops in his quest for justice, along the way chasing any skirt that walks past him. (Women in his city, apparently, are hot to bed a zombie in a red tie.) Meanwhile, the hero’s similarly invincible arch nemesis, the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson, who apparently dipped into the speedballs before filming anarchic sequences that give new definition to scenery-chewing), is seeking the mythical blood of Hercules, which could render either him or the Spirit immortal. He’s aided by Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson, bringing some va-va-voom to a thankless role), a geneticist who engineers obnoxious henchmen/South Jersey mooks, all of whom are played for cheap laughs by grinning Louis Lombardi.

The laughs don’t come. Neither do the thrills. Forsaking edge for over-the-top cartoon brawls, The Spirit is misguided and senseless from the first frame, when we meet some sort of angel of death before watching the hero bound across rooftops and along tightropes. This is supposed to reel us in, as is an extended opening fight sequence with the Octopus in which he and The Spirit endlessly bludgeon each other with random objects. A pipe? Whack! A rock? Ka-pow! “I’m gonna kill you all kinds of dead,” growls the hero before being brained with a toilet. “Toilets are always funny,” cackles Jackson.

From here on, The Spirit begins its slow descent down the toilet drain of quality. It’s a scattershot affair that never pulls its limitless ideas into anything cohesive. Miller unsuccessfully tries to balance darkness and camp, which should polarize fans seeking a true adaptation of Eisner and camp lovers seeking something of an Adam West experience. He grounds the movie in a 1940s aesthetic, but trails off into modernist genetic gobbledygook and the occasional anime-inspired sequence. The Spirit is portrayed with Macht’s sparing charisma as a walking libido with ample femme fatales—Johansson’s wack-job assistant, Eva Mendes’ thief with a plunging neckline, Sarah Paulson’s naive doctor—but the film’s impotent.

To call The Spirit a flop of Battlefield Earth caliber, as some critics have, isn’t quite fair. Battlefield Earth took itself hysterically seriously. Frank Miller takes nothing seriously, particularly his source material. In a year that reshaped the way non-nerds addressed the value of comic books on screen, The Spirit reminds us of how bad they can truly be. It should be exorcised before Will Eisner rises from the grave.