One star (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and overly generously, despite lots o' gore, violence and gruesome content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.8.09
Buy DVD: The Spirit
• Buy Blu-Ray: The Spirit (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy and BD Live)
Artistic sensibilities don't always mesh, and that must be recognized in the collaborative world of filmmaking.
It has nothing to do with respective ability; both individuals can be extremely talented, and yet be a bad "fit."
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| With dead cops on his hands and no firm leads, Commissioner Dolan (Dan Lauria, right) isn't the slightest bit pleased with the vigilante tactics employed by The Spirit (Gabriel Macht, left). Fresh-faced recruit Morgenstern (Stana Katic), on the other hand, is cheerfully certain that everything will work out for the best. Too bad the same can't be said of this film. |
One would not (for example) assign Quentin Tarantino to adapt a Jane Austen novel. By the same token, John Sayles — known for intelligent and thought-provoking indie fare such as Lone Star
and Passion Fish
— would be all wrong for a mindless summer blockbuster. And so it is that graphic novel impresario Frank Miller — the undeniable genius behind Sin City
, 300
and Batman's comic book revival in 1986's The Dark Knight Returns
— is wrong, wrong, wrong for the task of bringing Will Eisner's iconic Spirit to the big screen. Miller's starkly garish approach to visual stylization, and most particularly his bleak view of human behavior, are wholly at odds with Eisner's much gentler characters and far more whimsical storytelling.
The result is a mess: a crazy-quilt effort to re-invent The Spirit as yet another inhabitant of Miller's Sin City universe. This film is all but unwatchable, its jokey characters wholly at odds with the vulgar plotline, its actors buried beneath the wholly computer-generated backdrops also employed for the film versions of Sin City
and 300
.Never mind that such artifice is entirely wrong for The Spirit, whom Eisner deliberately placed on the believably mean streets inhabited by so many weary gumshoes in 1940s and '50s film noir thrillers. More aggravatingly, Miller's vision here is so uniformly dark — so starkly black and white, aside from occasional splotches of color (notably The Spirit's bright red necktie) — that it's difficult to see what's happening from one scene to the next.
It's a pity Miller didn't go all the way, and darken the screen to solid inkpot black. Then we'd have been spared watching the whole grisly thing.
Yes, this film actually is worse than the laughably corny 1987 TV movie with Sam Jones. At least than one got the tone right.
