The Spirit
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Directed by: Frank Miller
Starring:
Gabriel Macht - The Spirit
Samuel L. Jackson - The Octopus
Eva Mendes - Sand Serif
Scarlett Johansson - Silken Floss
Jamie King - Lorelei
Sarah Paulson - Ellen Dolan
Dan Lauria - Police Comissioner Dolan
Paz Vega - Plaster of Paris
Louis Lombardi - Phobos
Stana Katic - Morgenstern
The Spirit holds true to its comic book origin in that it wants to do everything. As a comic, Will Eisner's "The Spirit" could be mystery, horror, romance, comedy or any number of genres. Frank Miller's The Spirit wants to be gritty noir, madcap action, sexy romance, and pulpy action all rolled up into one. Unfortunately, Miller has no idea how to make all these genres coalesce and ends up with a wildly uneven movie that's at its best when it just goes completely Looney Toons.
In what feels like a very loose adaptation, The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) is a crime fighter in Central City who cannot be killed and is at war with The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) who also cannot be killed. Octopus wants The Spirit dead, not for personal reasons, but because he can't risk The Spirit getting his hands on the Blood of Heracles, which would make either man immortal. I would have accepted that Bad Guy wants to kill Good Guy and trying to give a character as insane as Octopus a reasonable motive falls flat, especially since The Spirit has no idea the Blood of Heracles even exists.
Thrown into the middle of their war is Sand Serif (Eva Mendes), the childhood love of The Spirit's past life, Denny Holt. Serif has the Blood but she wants the Golden Fleece because it's shiny and if diamonds are a girl's best friend, then they're Serif's only friend. There may have been more character development about her being a femme fatale but Miller cares more about her looks than her personality, demonstrated when Serif photocopies her ass for no reason.
You can see already that this is a pulpy story with Greek artifacts and names like "Sand Serif" and it's ridiculous from the start, with Octopus hitting The Spirit with a toilet seat while they fight in a swamp only to then remark, "What? Toilets are always funny!" It's not hard to see why clips such as that one got the film laughed out of Comic Con this past summer but had Miller kept this over-the-top tone throughout, I could have played along. I don't need all my superhero films to be deadly serious or even realistic (see Punisher: War Zone). But what I do need is some form of cohesive storytelling and The Spirit is a movie that will give you whiplash as it darts between madcap scenes with The Spirit fighting The Octopus and then wants to be gritty film noir in its next breath.
When the film is insane, it works and that insanity mostly comes from Jackson, Scarlett Johansson as his sidekick Silken Floss, and their cloned, brain-dead henchmen whose names all end with "Os" (i.e, Pathos, Logos, Matzos). If Jackson didn't take every role that was offered to him, I would applaud him on this choice as he clearly having a Snakes on a Plane-level of fun and devours every scene with glee. He knows that his character dresses up for no reason (in one scene he's in a kimono and the next he's in a S.S. uniform.) and has ridiculous motives so he just jumps right in. Proving a delightful deadpan foil is Johansson who also seems to be in on the joke and rather than trying to outmatch Jackson, simply plays off madness by being a sexy, stone-cold bitch. But as the "Os", Louis Lombardi almost beats them both as he provides the soft punching bag that lets you relish in that deep-seated desire to hit stupid people.
The rest of the cast isn't so lucky. As The Spirit, Macht's a lot of fun when he's not saddled him with endless "gritty" narration, both as voice-over and directly to the audience. You listen for what feels like an hour of The Spirit talking about lost loves and you wonder if the film forgot that the last scene involved a dissolving kitten named "Muffin".
As for the female members of the cast other than Johansson, their job is to be sexy and they do it well. When it's purely on a sexual level, that's when the film is having fun again. When the Spirit waxes philosophical about his love affair with death (Jamie King) or his conflicting emotions about Serif, we're dragged back into the grit where the film has no idea how badly it sucks.
As for the film's look, it's a mess. Visually, it's Miller doing Sin City again and my suspicions were confirmed that Miller isn't making the film look this way because it serves the narrative—it's because it's the only way he knows how to make the film. When the film goes bonkers, the design works because bold red backgrounds and streets of black stones are kind of nutty to begin with. But the look fails completely when the film snaps back to being noir. The look becomes even worse every time a piece of product placement is shoved in our faces. It's awkward to be running around this red-black-white playground (although it's a city that Miller fails to distinguish; a missed opportunity, especially as The Spirit refers to the city as a person, specifically, a woman) and then have some character texting on their Nokia as they pass a display for Bulgari jewelry. 1930s comic-book dialogue is difficult enough for an audience to swallow and it becomes borderline-impossible with the modern world casually thrown into the mix. But Miller is consistent is his inconsistency: while most of the cast talks in the 1930s comic-book style, The Octopus gets to use modern slang like "bling" and do whatever he wants.
I know I keep coming back to my praise of the film's insanity, but it's the only time when the film works. For example, there's a scene where The Octopus and Silken Floss are dressed as Nazis (Johansson standing in front of a giant photo of Adolf Hitler is one of the year's best moments in film), with The Spirit tied up and about to be sliced into bits by Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega) because that's the only way to stop him. Even better, there's a giant Nazi eagle (or falcon or hawk—I don't really feel like boning up on my Icongraphy of National Socialism) statue in the room. Where did they get it? Was it for the purpose of this moment? Did they just decide to make it because The Octopus doesn't half-ass his dress-up time? This scene goes on forever and yet I didn't want it to end. It was like being trapped in an amusement park—yeah, it sucks that you can't leave but you're in an amusement park so you may as well have some fun.
If Miller was making some sly observation about classic heroes and post-modern villains, I'd applaud this approach. But he's not. The Spirit is a shallow, mindless film that has none of the insight of Miller's comic work like The Dark Knight Returns or Sin City. And such a hollow product would be passable if it has just centered on giving the audience a batshit crazy good time. But The Spirit is a schizo and rather than embrace the madness, it floats aimlessly between the delightfully nutty and embarrassingly bad/painfully boring.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
12.18.08